‘The Equalizer 3’ Review: Brood, Kill, Sip a Cup of Tea, Repeat

As one does in Italy, Robert McCall likes to take a seat in a bit of cafe, watching the world go by. McCall — an enigmatic avenger performed by Denzel Washington — likes tea, however he’s positive with the espresso that a good looking server brings him with a smile. People typically smile at McCall, maybe drawn to his appears, his quiet mien and the restrained depth of his physicality, as if he had been holding again an amazing and terrifying drive. Or possibly, like the remainder of us, they’re making an attempt to silently encourage McCall to only get on with it and begin portray the city pink.

This is the third and apparently final “Equalizer” film that Washington will make. Maybe he’s grown bored with the franchise’s same-old ultraviolence or maybe he’s tired of the predictable predictability of all of it, even when this installment is as reliably watchable if ethically challenged because the earlier ones. Whatever the case, little has modified because the first “Equalizer” (2014). McCall continues to be the enigma all in black who, when brutal push comes inevitably to more-brutal shove, demonstrates extraordinary fight expertise, near-superhuman power and a genius for predicting the trajectory of our bodies flying and falling in house.

Washington is unsurprisingly the first motive to look at “Equalizer 3,” which is principally a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and lightweight up the display screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly stunning city on the Amalfi coast. Tucked beneath a mountain and going through the ocean, the city is miraculously freed from swarming vacationers, which is among the story’s extra outlandish conceits. McCall lands there quickly after the opener, an enormous, splashy quantity in Sicily that units the darkly brooding temper and underscores that villains ought to by no means be too cavalier about leaving their corkscrews mendacity round. Our man isn’t going to make use of it to uncork a bottle of Nero d’Avola.

The corkscrew leads to the identical weak spot the place you’d count on it to go, particularly if in case you have seen the primary “Equalizer.” In that film, the skewered baddie was a minion within the Russian mob; the human cork right here is within the Italian mafia (particularly the Camorra). The repeat of the corkscrew bit provides to the film’s retrospective high quality, as if Washington and his principal collaborators within the sequence — the screenwriter Richard Wenk and the director Antoine Fuqua — had been bidding a nostalgic farewell to McCall and the grim, darkish (morally, actually) fallen world that he has been making an attempt to set proper all these years.

A reliably energetic, typically stressed director, Fuqua has tamped down his customary visible flamboyance, and for essentially the most half he merely oscillates between many, many sweeping aerial pictures and nearer ones of the actors (the solid contains Dakota Fanning and Remo Girone) doing their factor. Some of those eagle-eye factors of view could also be a operate of the city’s tight coordinates, although Fuqua might similar to taking part in with drones. He additionally tosses in just a few cineaste nods — McCall’s head is shaved once more, so cue “Apocalypse Now” — as he provides up a imaginative and prescient of recent Italy (previous males with fishing nets) as canned as something shot on an previous Hollywood lot.

Although the places and supporting actors are typically new, nothing else is, familiarity being a part of the attraction of this sort of style commonplace. Once once more, a broodily charismatic, patriarchal American loner serves as jury, decide and executioner, meting out punishment to the depraved and avenging the wronged. To that finish, it’s instructive that you just don’t study why McCall is in Italy till very late. You might briefly surprise what he’s doing within the nation — is he retired, on a mission or trip? — however this data is as irrelevant because the names of these he dispatches. All that issues is watching McCall kill, for justice and leisure.

The Equalizer 3
Rated R for excessive gun, knife and corkscrew violence. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.