The Equalizer 3

 

Antoine Fuqua likes directing pictures about bad good men or men who aren't sure which they are, as Denzel Washington's Robert McCall describes himself when asked by a doctor tending to the wounds McCall sustained in Equalizer 3's opening sequence.

In either case, Fuqua's protagonists are often engaged in quests that are partly vengeance and partly redemption.

Washington, who is almost 70, reprises his role as an anal-retentive killing machine who finds himself in a beautiful village on the Amalfi coast of Italy after methodically neutralizing a drug-smuggling operation in Sicily. The mafioso in picturesque Altamonte terrorize the people and cow the police for reasons that aren't made clear until the final reel.

McCall is ambivalent about playing avenging angel as he settles into life in the village and meets the criminal "cancer" (Andrea Scarduzio) that's intent on turning the town into his base of operation.

A former Marine and black ops asset, McCall passes along information about the drug-smuggling in Sicily to a junior CIA agent named Emma Collins, played by Dakota Fanning. Collins tracks McCall to the village. She is both challenged and intrigued by the mysterious informant.

When it becomes clear that peace will not come to the village without his help, McCall, with his trademark precision, takes on the Mob with slasher intensity.

The body count might lead some to compare the Equalizer franchise to the much more cartoonish John Wick series, but the ethos at work in the former is much more righteous, in a twisted Hollywood way, than the latter. Both McCall and Wick are lethal assassins, but McCall is indeed a decent human being, while Wick is more of a determined victim of unsavory circumstances brought on by his former underworld occupation.

Equalizer 3 underscores what the two previous pictures established -- nothing is deadlier than a good man pissed off.