The Equalizer 3 movie review & film summary (2023) – Roger Ebert

In Sicily, an Italian drug lord and his youngster pull up in a jeep to a secluded villa. Strewn throughout the country courtyard, which, on higher days, could be an excellent trip spot, are the bloodied, dismembered our bodies of a goon military. The person exits the jeep with a pistol, leaving the child within the automobile. He and one among his henchmen enter the house, the place they uncover extra carcasses, whose causes of dying—riddled with bullets, their faces cleaved by a butcher’s knife—develop more and more ugly. Famous hitman turned ghost Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) sits beneath two gunmen. Is McCall the prisoner, or are they? He, in fact, dispatches them with ease, grabbing a set of keys from the useless drug lord’s physique that maintain what McCall got here to retrieve. 

You gained’t guess what mundane package deal McCall has simply murdered a military of killers to get. But it surely doesn’t actually matter. Whereas the ham-fisted McGuffin doesn’t serve the remainder of the movie, this opening scene—from its stomach-churning violence to the reliance on impractical results—signifies the place this as soon as pleasant nuts-and-bolts motion franchise has gone mistaken. 

Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer 3” isn’t just what many assume would be the final movie within the franchise; it’s the fifth general collaboration between the director and Washington. Their partnership, on its face, is puzzling. Certain, their first teaming, “Coaching Day,” netted Washington his lone Finest Actor win. However their successive movies have solely gotten harsher and dumber since that triumph. What precisely does Washington get out of those movies? It’s a relationship that usually recollects the run Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart skilled of their eight photos collectively (although, to make certain, Fuqua-Washington has mined far poorer thematic treasures) when Stewart left his status perch, his good-guy picture, and aw-shucks mannerisms to discover darker tales in Mann’s liberating Westerns. You possibly can inform Washington will get the identical pleasure right here, not caring if the viewers experiences the identical adventurous sensations he does. 

As a result of, make no mistake, “The Equalizer 3” is scorching rubbish. It’s additionally a captivating however failed try by Fuqua and Washington to make their very own Mann-Stewart movie. Take into account how the Western style stains this image. Throughout McCall’s raid on the villa, he’s critically wounded and finally found by a neighborhood cop, Gio (Eugenio Mastrandrea), who takes him to a quaint seaside Italian village, the place a neighborhood physician named Enzo (Remo Girone) treats the hitman’s wounds. Whereas recuperating within the restful city, McCall learns to like the folks and the peace they supply him. Although a neighborhood younger gang chief, Marco (Andrea Dodero), looms over them, McCall, who says he’s merely passing by way of, would moderately keep away from intervening. Like every Western, when push involves shove, McCall will defend them whereas instructing these acquiescing folks the right way to stand as much as their oppressors. 

Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson (“Platoon” and “A Few Good Man”) present additional Western particulars by way of chiaroscuro lighting. Washington’s silhouette spells hazard, whereas his weary body expresses a detailed relationship to dying. Richardson additionally captures the actor from excessive low angles, a la John Ford, portray heroic compositions. The issue, nonetheless, is that they’ve made McCall so vicious we’re not fairly certain if we ought to be rooting for him to kill. Whereas it is sensible for the character to point out higher brutality—in spite of everything, within the first “Equalizer,” he was as soon as a relaxed man idling in retirement—now he’s a person absolutely bathed in blood and guts once more. Even Washington can’t absolutely pull throughout that throughline, particularly when the script is so weak.