If an actor’s career can be said to obey the same laws that govern physics, then Denzel Washington’s turn in the third big-screen Equalizer reboot (the Threequalizer!) represents the corresponding opposite reaction to his last role as the Lord Macbeth for Joel Coen. Washington brought a frailty and introspection to the Thane of Cawdor, played as a greying lion-runt with insecurities giving way to a corrosive bloodlust. As Robert McCall, the erstwhile marine and intelligence-agency ghost cleaning up the streets in his retirement, Washington gets the chance to refute the idea that the savage passage of years must eat away at a man. Yoked with that same weight of pre-geriatric regret, he’s now able to conquer it and win at life, his willingness to kill making him a hero rather than tragic figure.
With a superhuman physical fitness allowing him to dominate toughs a third of his age, a tactical acumen creating the illusion that he knows everything at all times, and a teasy little rapport with the decades-younger waitress at his favorite cafe, he projects the picture of capability. Age is just a number, in this case dwarfed by his body count. As McCall spends a few scenes hobbling about with a cane following an injury sustained in the field, the anxiety of getting old nips at this movie’s heels, but its pipe dream of overpowered obsolescence responds with AK-47 fire.
Director Antoine Fuqua wants a little bit of that Shakespearean gravitas from Washington, who evinces a clear understanding of his rudimentary character: he does bad things for good reasons, meting out punishment only to those who deserve it and feeling duly guilty for his dirty work afterward. McCall has a conflicted relationship to violence, but his film does not. The big distinguishing factor in the final piece of a profitable trilogy – its margins firmed up with generous product placement for American luxury car brands inexplicably driven by Italians – is a hysterical hunger for carnage in turns fun and sickening, just a notch or two away from the high standard set by Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson go out of their way to show us the wanton gore, often modulating a shot so that the camera can get the most unobstructed view of ruptured arteries or knives sticking out of faces. In one moment suggesting a superior cut willing to go all in on mutilation, McCall gouges an enemy’s eyeball out, jams a gun barrel in the hole, and shoots another assailant through the skull.
Don’t worry, it’s fine, they’re all mafia. McCall lands in a postcard-quality seaside town by the Sicilian shore after an assignment gone belly-up, and takes it upon himself to purge the area of the organized criminals forcing everyone out to make room for developers. He finds this charming hamlet worth fighting for, with its simple, purehearted residents seemingly plucked from the rose-hued romanticism of Cinema Paradiso. It’s an unmistakably American vision of Italian country life, all flattering hat salesmen and convivial fishmongers and religious paraders. The scenic thousand-year-old church sitting atop a hill, the climb to which becomes a lumbering metaphor for perseverance and progress, also introduces the Catholic iconography that will be leaned on in a climax posturing toward contemplation of sin. Ultimately, the film adopts a “well, what’re you gonna do” position on the matter.
McCall gives and gets a hand from a CIA rookie (Dakota Fanning, her chemistry with Washington not so changed since Man on Fire in 2004) who asks how he pegged her for an operative while dressed exactly like Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty. The script contains a lot of boneheadedness along those lines, only some of it amusing; one can’t help but smack their gums as a target of La Cosa Nostra says into her phone that she’ll call right back as soon as she gets into her car. But talk of anonymous Middle Eastern terrorists peddling a “jihad drug” amphetamine leaves a sourer taste, and hints at the deeper vein of conservatism constant in a series about enforcing order by any means necessary. For all McCall’s brutality, his ol’-fashioned values of neatness and politeness always triumph over the improprieties of the younger generations, humbled by a schooling at the garrote-wielding hands of their elder.
When he takes a break from glowering, Washington appears to be having a good time with the occasional wisecrack, as well he should. His Sony-subsidized European vacation doubles as good PR, framing him as a movie star at the top of his game even as he wades through a forgettable potboiler. Like McCall, he knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.
The Equalizer 3 is out in Australia on 31 August and in US and UK cinemas on 1 September
