‘The Equalizer 3’ Reminds You Why Denzel Washington Is a National Treasure

Nobody can threaten someone quietly better than Denzel Washington.

Oh, our man can pump up the volume when he needs to, in terms of letting people know he’s bringing the pain — our ears are still ringing from his “King Kong ain’t got shit on me!” taunt from Training Day. But when he lowers his voice to a basso profundo rumble and he fixes that dead-eyed stare on someone, the one that suggests the unflappable, untouchable Teflon Denzel has officially entered the building, and issues some sort of oh-you’ve-stepped-in-it-now promise of bodily harm? It’s enough to make you laugh out loud and send chills down your spine.

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Washington knows this. So does director Antoine Fuqua. And the duo behind the Equalizer movies understand that the fans of the 2014 action flick and its 2018 sequel come expecting those calm-before-the-Category-5-storm moments for just that rush. Hence, The Equalizer 3 doesn’t wait long to drop a good one on folks. We enter the movie en massacre res, following a gangster as he winds his way past a dozen scattered corpses in a Sicilian winery. Several of his henchmen have their guns trained on Robert McCall, a.k.a. the ex-military intelligence officer who’s taken up “equalizing” as a hobby in his autumn years. The capo wants to know why his thugs are lying dead in the hallway. “They wouldn’t let me in,” McCall casually replies. “So….”

Then he clicks the timer on his watch and tells this boss, in that near-whisper of his, that he has nine seconds to decide his fate. Before the timer goes off, McCall has disarmed one man, shot several others, and stuck the gun barrel in another’s eye socket. The gangster, it goes without saying, makes the wrong choice and soon, there’s one more body on the floor.

It’s an opening sequence that’s cartoonishly violent and so self-reflexively cool you can feel a chill coming off of it, and that combination — along with this movie star’s gajillion-watt charisma — has turned these films into slick populist hits. Never mind that this whole endeavor conceptually started as a big-screen adaptation of a CBS procedural from the Eighties starring Edward Woodward (which has itself been resurrected on the Tiffany Network with Queen Latifah). The Equalizer is now 100-percent Washington’s revenge-thriller franchise, his Trashterpiece Theater, his modern-day Death Wish: A vigilante blessed with a preternatural calm, a particular set of skills, a stainless steel moral compass, and a love for the little guy who does what the law can’t or won’t. A TV spot for The Equalizer 3 has Washington recounting that a fan said he loved McCall “because [he] gets the guys we wanna get.” The carnage isn’t the only thing that feels plucked from vintage grindhouse cinema. So does the wish fulfillment.

And while we won’t spoil the reason McCall finds himself in Southern Italy — let’s just say it’s both completely ridiculous and totally on-brand — this final film of Fuqua’s trilogy is ultimately less concerned with the why and more into the who’s gonna get got this time around. Wounded during his escape from that Sicilian estate, McCall is treated by a kindly doctor (Remo Girone) and spends several weeks recuperating in the quaint town of Altomonte. He befriends the locals, notably a cop (Eugenio Mastrandrea) and a cafe owner (Gaia Scodellaro). As the plentiful scenes of friendly coastal villagers and gorgeous seaside vistas attest — you’d swear that the Southern Italian Tourist Board were producers on the movie — life is good here. Not even a C.I.A. analyst named Emma (Dakota Fanning), who’s snooping around Altomonte to see if McCall had something to do with that winery debacle, can ruin this slice of paradise for him.

Then some Camorra thugs show up, shaking down fish sellers and shopkeepers for protection money. The main offender is Marco Quaranta (Andrea Dodero), who takes pleasure in tormenting these nice people. And if there’s one thing McCall can’t stand, it’s nice people being tormented. He asks Marco and his gang to leave everyone alone and leave town. Otherwise, things could get messy. Marco asks if McCall is threatening him. “I’m preparing you,” he replies, in that same Teflon Denzel whisper that may as well be a funeral march.

We await the justice that’s inevitably about to be served, which The Equalizer 3 soon dutifully serves up in gory, bloody, supersized amounts even before the big-boss battle between McCall and Marco’s Mafia-chieftain brother, Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio). Fuqua has never been shy about making this franchise’s action sequences a figurative and, more often than not, literal cut above the usual bang-bang stab-stab set pieces in matters of brutality (see: that climactic showdown in a jury-rigged hardware store from the first film). In a post-John Wick world, it’s now a given that fight scenes and stand-offs have to be bigger, faster, bloodier, more. Washington can more than handle himself when it comes to, say, convincingly making somebody shank themselves rapid-fire with their own blade. But the move in E3 seems to be upping the kills to slasher-flick levels, complete with Denzel stepping out of the shadows and sticking fireplace pokers through throats. Were McCall the screaming type, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear him bellow, “Freddy Krueger ain’t got shit on me!”

This has always been Washington’s showcase, not just in terms of an AARP-age action hero vehicle but as a stage for him to strut without the least bit of fretting. Whenever this third chapter takes time out to have Fanning’s fresh young agent nosing around Rome and trying to untangle a larger network involving the Mob, Syrian terrorists and drug money, you can sense the lack of interest on both sides of the screen. Whenever the focus returns to Denzel silently observing, walking with a Jedi master’s agility and exuding an apex predator’s confidence before an attack, you can feel this movie start to ascend to something like a genre state of grace. Keeping things simple — McCall vs. Mafia, Mafia fucks around and finds out — works wonders here. Those sections are what makes this Equalizer 3 the de facto highlight of the trilogy, even if calling this a great movie is stretching it. It’s a great excuse to watch Washington be a Movie Star in the most natural and unfiltered way. If this is the last of this duo’s brand-name vigilante thrillers, at least it’s going out on a properly pulpy high note.

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