There is probably something I am mercifully forgetting in the moment of attempting to recall the worst-ever trilogy of mainstream movies. But the most useless would have to be The Equalizer, The Equalizer 2 and now The Equalizer 3, aka Man on (Comfortable Glider-Rocker Sipping Tea and Warming His Aged, Creaking Bones Next to a Warm, Crackling) Fire.
Across more than 10 years and numerous hours, what have any of these movies done well besides spend Sony’s money and bring them a modest sum of it in return? Denzel Washington is not drawing anything other than a paycheck; in this one, he barely bothers to even show up for a majority of the action sequences (and more on that in a moment). Director Antoine Fuqua is not coloring in new corners of modern masculine outrage as he has in other works before and since. The second film perhaps comes closest to understanding the assignment — which is that you essentially just want to watch Washington authoritatively annihilate unassuming goons. But who remembers anything about it besides Pedro Pascal being in the party and some rainy cliffside confrontations? Exactly. Washington and Fuqua probably don’t, either.
As for Washington’s notable absence in moments when McCall is mowing people down: Some people have latched onto the notion that makes this Equalizer a slasher film and that it’s somehow some form of commentary on the violence it features. Look. It’s September. Summer is fundamentally over. Dune 2 isn’t coming out until next year now. We’re all wondering what the fall and winter will look like with strike-driven uncertainties. But anyone who gives you the slasher-film argument with a straight face is simply being an asshole. Former soldier and intelligence officer Robert McCall (Washington) is not a slasher. He’s just a somnambulant sexagenarian who wants to settle down somewhere outside of Sicily. The only hints of personality here are when he warns a goon not to “shit on yourself” and when he stretches his cane behind his neck like he’s about to jump into a little Kander-and-Ebb-accompanied soft-shoe. (Spoiler alert: He does not.)
McCall is in Italy to investigate a cyber-crime for reasons not revealed until the film’s final moments. Functionally, those reasons are so McCall can jam a gun barrel through one guy’s eye and empty the magazine through his head and into another guy. It’s the film’s high point and it transpires in the first five minutes. The cane bit is as McCall, nursing his wounds from that encounter, sizes up other members of the mafia menacing the good people of Altamonte — a tranquil coastal town where McCall thinks he could finally settle. Before that can happen, he’ll have to deploy his supernatural-savagery skills once more. (Yes, the movie pretends wiping out one crime family will save the village forever — wiping out decades of proven mafia strategy to fill a vacuum with muscle as it opens up.)
The Equalizer 3 further tethers the treacherous small-town mafia stuff to international terrorism, and in a way that lets the film become an ersatz reunion of Washington and Dakota Fanning after 2004’s Man on Fire. It primarily feels like something mandated for CIA consultant cooperation — an ultimate zone-out before a hilariously terrible explosion effect and, eventually, the most hilariously dumb tieback to the previous films that returning writer Richard Wenk could have crafted. There’s more light on a hospital monitor for vital signs than in Fanning’s eyes at any given moment.
“We all end up where we’re supposed to be,” McCall tells the first of many mafiosi he will massacre before the movie’s over. Sad that, for Washington and Fuqua, it’s making a well-shot, on-location version of those movies where Steven Seagal mostly sits in a chair.