The Equalizer 3 wouldn’t qualify as the jewel of Denzel Washington’s filmography, but it belongs on the crown. Skeptics: Please watch this one on Netflix before it’s gone on July 1.
Washington has two Oscars and nine nominations to his name, plus multiple Tonys for his stage work, and he’s devoted a good portion of his career to bringing the work of playwright August Wilson to screens. He is rightfully regarded as a god-tier thespian. And yet Washington is no stranger to pageturner-y fluff, which he elevates with the same swagger he brings to Shakespeare. His three Equalizer movies are the middle ground between the stoic forcefulness of his award-worthy dramatic turns, and the multiple movies he made with hyper-dynamic director Tony Scott, in which he manages trains. (Unstoppable and the Taking of Pelham 123 remake.) But The Equalizer 3 perfects the formula.
As the Equalizer, Washington plays ex-Marine and DIA officer Robert McCall, who is supposedly out of the hero game, except that he keeps getting recruited by those in need, over and over and over again. He can’t help it! He loves to do good, using his honed sense of sight and sound, which director Antoine Fuqua treats like a superpower.
The first in the series, 2014’s The Equalizer (also on Netflix) is kind of a mess: Washington is stuck dealing with sappy drama before Fuqua overplays his John Wick-level skills. There’s no balance, no tension, and fewer beatdowns than you might expect a movie in which McCall needs to take down Russian sex traffickers. But the one time the Equalizer sets his watch to his the exact amount of time it’ll take him to slice through a room full of goons, then executes his plan in ice-cold fashion… Well, that’s gold.
The Equalizer 2 (also on Netflix!) inches closer to what works without fully cracking a plot that gives Washington much to chew on. And what works is watching the star smack guys around. Also, like another TV adaptation franchise, the Mission: Impossible series, it acknowledges that putting your hero on a train is an easy way to create momentum in and outside a fight scene.
Fuqua turns the tables in The Equalizer 3 to maximum effect: As we have noted before, McCall essentially becomes Michael Myers in the threequel, stalking and hunting and knifing his way through unsuspecting victims. Luckily, the target of his slasher mayhem is the Italian mafia, who are very unkind to the locals of the Amalfi Coast! And in each action sequence, Washington strikes terror.
On top of the horror-tinged cinematography from legend Robert Richardson, Fuqua wisely avoids treating McCall as unkillable, which he seemed to be in the past installments. The opening sequence finds McCall plowing through baddies — hoping to avenge a couple bankrupted by cyber-crime, which puts him in good company with The Beekeeper and Thelma — but in the end, he takes a devastating shot to the back. Bad! Luckily, a local stumbles across his unconscious body and nurses him back to health. The respite of laying low and drinking espresso brings him closer to the village, which is plagued by mafiosos. His ruffling of feathers catches the eye of a CIA agent played by Dakota Fanning, who co-starred with Washington as the little kidnapped girl in 2004’s Man on Fire, and is now somehow old enough for a role as a CIA agent.
There’s a surprising amount of sensitive dialogue between Washington and his Italian company as he learns of their constant fear and the mafia stranglehold on their businesses. Fanning is a formidable performer opposite him when she enters the picture, with a number of fair questions as to why vigilante justice is even mildly acceptable to a man of honor. All this is threaded between actual action scenes, unlike the oil-and-water combo of The Equalizer, and Fuqua and Washington never mask the fact that a 68-year-old man is performing the stunts. The punches the Equalizer takes hurt as much as the ones he delivers. (Tom Cruise could learn this lesson.)
There are many great Denzel Washington action movies that rank above The Equalizer 3 in the pantheon — here they are, in fact — but in this era, it’s easy to see a “3” in a title and completely dismiss the effort. The Equalizer 3 deserves the attention — at the very least, to prepare you for The Equalizer 4.
