I can imagine that a few distinct groups around Massachusetts were vaguely upset when it was revealed that Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer 3 was heading to Italy after two straight films set in Boston: Autograph hounds that took a break from stalking whoever was in town to play the Sox to try and get Denzel to sign some shit, local economists, folks who were excited that someone other than Ben Affleck or Seth MacFarlane were trying to bring big-budget goofballery to our city streets. But trust me, guys, it’s for the best: Equalizer 3 is the best version of these movies in part because it has very little to do with the United States. What it does have a whole lot of is charm, which is to be somewhat expected with these movies, only this time, that charm is the rule and not the exception. These movies have been solid TNT watches during baseball season — the very definition of a proverbial three-star classic — in which one can switch away to see a replay of that dope double-play without having to worry that they missed too much, but Equalizer 3 might actually keep your attention all the way through until the credits.
We open with a Camorra boss investigating one of his Sicilian wine cellars in the aftermath of a Robert McCall (Denzel) massacre, finding his capos’ carcasses in various states of gory rigor mortis. He left three men alive, two of whom have McCall cornered in the cellar. Sure enough, the dude drops all four of them and escapes unscathed until the boss’ elementary-age grandson plugs him with a deuce-deuce round right in the back. The kid scrams, never to be seen again, and McCall considers killing himself, but he fired his last round in the chaos, so he’s got no choice but to flee the scene — and live. He manages to make it back to the mainland before he passes out from the blood loss, only to be rescued by a small-town cop who takes him to a private doctor instead of the hospital. He patches McCall up and lets him stay with him while he recovers, and the immutable badass slowly takes a liking to his surroundings. It is Italy, after all. But the town’s being menaced by the Camorra, specifically through two brothers who take protection money from the townspeople and use it to hawk shitty amphetamines from terrorist groups. McCall is eventually forced into action once he recovers, and he enlists the help of a young CIA agent (Dakota Fanning, and holy shit, it has been nearly twenty years since Man on Fire) to bring down the mob and protect the town he might just call a new home.
It’s sort of strange to describe a movie like Equalizer 3 as a love letter to Italian and Italian-centric cinema, but it is. And I don’t mean in the easy way, where one can trot out comparisons to Leone or Corbucci or Fulci (though all of them are well-represented, especially Fulci, who would be exceedingly pleased with the level of brutality in Fuqua’s violence here), but in a way that recalls a kind of expat romance, like David Lean’s Summertime. Replace the technicolor sheen with a murky, desaturated palette (a downgrade) and the romantic strife with Denzel jamming a pistol into a dude’s eye socket and using the guy’s body as a human shield while returning fire through his skull (an even trade, I’d say), and you have a similar sort of film: An American finds themselves in Italy, becomes enchanted with the culture, and is torn over whether or not to leave. The strongest parts of this movie aren’t the action scenes (though they are good), but rather the bizarro sweetness with which McCall interacts with the small town that’s taken him in. Getting conned into buying a sale-rack hat by a salesman at a clothing shop, parsing the freshness of the day’s catch with the fishmonger, having a cappuccino served to him in lieu of his tea by a barista who thinks that Earl Grey should be reserved for “the old and the English:” these are the pleasures of the Equalizer films under Fuqua, and he doubles down on them.
Moreover, what’s great about Fuqua and company uprooting the franchise from the South End is that it eliminates the one thing that kept these movies from being great little genre exercises: The emphasis on McCall’s past, which distracted from the creature comfort of the essential premise. Action has tended towards the aggressively overcomplicated since the ’10s — the beautiful simplicity of the first John Wick and The Raid films gave way to their sequels’ bloated runtimes and, in the case of the latter, endless monologuing as if we really cared much about Indonesian mafioso politicking — and Equalizer 2 was no exception to this rule, with Pedro Pascal showing up as Denzel’s ex-partner and the ongoing subplot with his history with CIA stooges Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo. To put it plainly, action is often more about observation than explanation, and the Wick movies, at the very least, managed to never quite lose sight of this fact. We flocked to the theater for each chapter not because we cared about the ownership of the Continental or the inner workings of the High Table, but rather because we wanted to see what crazy shit Keanu was going to get himself into (and out of) this time around. The same, I’d argue, holds true for most great modern action cinema — it is, after all, why we refer to them as “[Actor Name] movies” even when the character almost becomes synonymous with the persona.
Of course, things ultimately do wind up looping back to establish some sort of connection to the rest of the series (aside from Denzel himself), but they’re merely neat little bows tied to limit the franchise’s loose ends. By ditching most of CIA shit and just letting his character exist in a bizarro pastoral setting, Fuqua is able to focus on what makes these movies weirdly delightful: Watching the very strange yet endearing character of Robert McCall make his way through the world, patiently organizing his tea-drinking set-up at a cafe table with the same rigor that he mercilessly executes a low-level goon, charming the innocent while striking fear into the hearts of those who should fear righteous justice. It even has the gall to do something almost unheard of in modern action: Approximate a happy ending, with plenty of opportunities for Equalizer 4 down the road should it be called for.
In doing so, The Equalizer 3 manages to find a sweet spot in which, to quote a wise man, McCall “walks the Earth, like Kane in Kung Fu,” stepping in Mifune- or Eastwood-style to create parity between the unequal parties, shepherding the meek through the valley of darkness and protecting them against those who would attempt to poison and destroy their brothers. And when that great vengeance and furious anger makes itself manifest in a black button-down and a pair of khakis, it becomes satisfying in a way that the other two movies aren’t: Punishment, being metered out righteously, so efficiently that he can time it out on a stopwatch.