Movie Review: The Equalizer 3

One of the reasons why we go to the movies is because we want to see the world in the eyes of other people. We also like to see good people be happy and succeed, as much as we want to see evil people get what they deserve and in extreme cases, burn in hell. In movie franchises, there has probably never been a more vigorous advocate for defending the good and killing the bad than the character Robert McCall, played by Denzel Washington in the 3 Equalizer movies. For stories like this to work, with violence this extreme, the evil people who are killed must be evil enough in their actions to deserve how they die. Without extreme evil, extreme violence like this would never seem justified.

Of the 3 movies, this 3rd installment has some of the most over the top violence, including McCall at the start of this movie killing one man by shooting his gun through the hole he created in the eye of another man. In terms of imaginative killing, this scene within the first 10 minutes has to be one of the all-time bloody movie scenes to never forget.

Another standout of this movie is that the good people in this small town in Italy are as nice and likable as any people you could ever find in any movie, and the bad people, a gang of murdering criminals within a Mafia gang are as bad as any of the evil people in any of the 3 Equalizer movies. This gang, run by two competing brothers demand payouts from all of the local businesses and if the business owners cannot pay, they are either beaten or their business burned down.

There are several impressive scenes of McCall’s swift reflexes and extreme skills in martial arts that are far above any criminal’s ability to defend themselves. I can only guess that the extreme speed that Denzel demonstrates in these violent scenes is created by speeding up the film because it is hard to believe that anyone can move, injure and kill that quickly.

McCall contacts and then is confronted by a CIA agent, Emma Collins, played by Dakota Fanning who is the daughter of McCall’s close friends in the last Equalizer movie. In their scenes, the chemistry and acting between Danzel and Dakota are all very well done. The course of this story slowly changes from a suspected terrorist cell to the Mafia group that is really behind the drug traffic in the area.

I was disspointed with the ending, that was the expected violent climax with McCall taking care of business and wiping out the entire Mafia gang, but the action scenes were less imaginative than I would have expected and is probably the cause of the relatively low Rotten Tomatoes of only 73%. This is a rating I agree with and give Equalizer a marginal recommendation – mainly due to the ending that should have been much better.