The Equalizer 3
This is not a ‘People’s Choice’ pick, but rather falls into the category of ‘Spontaneous Viewing’. I took some holidays to the Amalfi coast in the middle 1980s, my first visits to Italy, and during an exercise akin to ‘channel hopping’ saw there were scenes of Atrani, just down the mountain and round the corner from Ravello, where I stayed. I don’t know Atrani nearly as well as Ravello and Amalfi, so I didn’t get the memories I got with, say Netflix’s RIPLEY series.
I have never seen a film in this franchise before, although I did watch the original television series with Edward Woodward back in the 1980s. Given its four-season run, it strikes me as having been surprisingly unpopular, never breaking into the top twenty. Woodward’s Robert McCall is an unprepossessing man who needs a hobby now that his children have left home. Nor was the show especially violent. A lot of big talk followed by a sudden deflation of the villains. What, I wonder, made it attractive enough to merit a re-boot on the big screen?
By contrast the Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) of THE EQUALIZER 3 is a much more monstrous proposition. Not having seen the other films, I am not sure if he has ever been ‘explained’ properly. Here, we meet him as a broodingly philosophical killing machine. We are in Sicily, at a vineyard, and a man (Bruno Bilotta) returns home to his villa to find it full of bodies. In a wine cellar, he finds McCall, at whom three of his surviving armed guards are pointing guns. McCall takes out the lot in a rapid, choreographed execution. In the course of his escape he takes a bullet, but is saved by Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea), the local member of the Carbanieri, and taken to Dr Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone). As he recovers in ‘Altamonte’ – weirdly at the bottom rather than the top of a mountain – McCall wonders if he has found a place where he can be at peace.
When McCall isn’t killing people, he is a genial fellow. Quiet, neat, with a winning grin and a way of saying a lot with a few words. The moody butcher dissipates and we might actually be charmed. This is, in fact, an archetype of Hollywood masculinity. He pops up again and again in films, normally as a good guy whose killing is justified by the immorality of his opponents. This, though, is not always as the case: Mr Blonde in RESERVOIR DOGS is the same character. We know that McCall is a good guy because he does not take pleasure in killing. As with all good guys, he kills out of necessity. Or does he? There’s a hint of ambiguity in the Washington McCall that is wholly absent from the Woodward one. Both worked for US intelligence, and both are retired. Notionally, McCall embarks on these missions voluntarily nowadays. He could choose another career. That he does not is the true source of his troubles. Perhaps he is trying to atone for his sins. But maybe he likes it. Like Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS, his place ought to be in the wilderness. He is too dangerous for civilisation.
The film tries very hard to make the vigilante a sympathetic figure, but anyone pausing to think critically about THE EQUALIZER 3 must regard this as a failure. Of course he comes up against an exceptionally nasty collection of hooligans and gangsters, but the film goes some way to showing them as a problem deeply interwoven into the state itself. It was once a staple of such films that the US defence and intelligence services had ‘bad apples’ who might conspire against the mass of the people they are supposed to serve, or enrich themselves at the government’s expense or assist an enemy power. Nowadays, we mustn't assume those who work hard to keep us 'safe' have any badness in them. Nevertheless, in a world where drone strikes indiscriminately kill innocents and villains alike, we can wonder if McCall’s career involved him being sent by ‘bad apples’ to kill inconvenient people. In a foreign land, whatever peace McCall brings to the people he helps will surely last only as long as the threat of McCall does. Maybe it would be better if the US just didn’t get involved? But then, of course, a retired McCall might lose.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
I have never seen a film in this franchise before, although I did watch the original television series with Edward Woodward back in the 1980s. Given its four-season run, it strikes me as having been surprisingly unpopular, never breaking into the top twenty. Woodward’s Robert McCall is an unprepossessing man who needs a hobby now that his children have left home. Nor was the show especially violent. A lot of big talk followed by a sudden deflation of the villains. What, I wonder, made it attractive enough to merit a re-boot on the big screen?
By contrast the Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) of THE EQUALIZER 3 is a much more monstrous proposition. Not having seen the other films, I am not sure if he has ever been ‘explained’ properly. Here, we meet him as a broodingly philosophical killing machine. We are in Sicily, at a vineyard, and a man (Bruno Bilotta) returns home to his villa to find it full of bodies. In a wine cellar, he finds McCall, at whom three of his surviving armed guards are pointing guns. McCall takes out the lot in a rapid, choreographed execution. In the course of his escape he takes a bullet, but is saved by Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea), the local member of the Carbanieri, and taken to Dr Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone). As he recovers in ‘Altamonte’ – weirdly at the bottom rather than the top of a mountain – McCall wonders if he has found a place where he can be at peace.
When McCall isn’t killing people, he is a genial fellow. Quiet, neat, with a winning grin and a way of saying a lot with a few words. The moody butcher dissipates and we might actually be charmed. This is, in fact, an archetype of Hollywood masculinity. He pops up again and again in films, normally as a good guy whose killing is justified by the immorality of his opponents. This, though, is not always as the case: Mr Blonde in RESERVOIR DOGS is the same character. We know that McCall is a good guy because he does not take pleasure in killing. As with all good guys, he kills out of necessity. Or does he? There’s a hint of ambiguity in the Washington McCall that is wholly absent from the Woodward one. Both worked for US intelligence, and both are retired. Notionally, McCall embarks on these missions voluntarily nowadays. He could choose another career. That he does not is the true source of his troubles. Perhaps he is trying to atone for his sins. But maybe he likes it. Like Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS, his place ought to be in the wilderness. He is too dangerous for civilisation.
The film tries very hard to make the vigilante a sympathetic figure, but anyone pausing to think critically about THE EQUALIZER 3 must regard this as a failure. Of course he comes up against an exceptionally nasty collection of hooligans and gangsters, but the film goes some way to showing them as a problem deeply interwoven into the state itself. It was once a staple of such films that the US defence and intelligence services had ‘bad apples’ who might conspire against the mass of the people they are supposed to serve, or enrich themselves at the government’s expense or assist an enemy power. Nowadays, we mustn't assume those who work hard to keep us 'safe' have any badness in them. Nevertheless, in a world where drone strikes indiscriminately kill innocents and villains alike, we can wonder if McCall’s career involved him being sent by ‘bad apples’ to kill inconvenient people. In a foreign land, whatever peace McCall brings to the people he helps will surely last only as long as the threat of McCall does. Maybe it would be better if the US just didn’t get involved? But then, of course, a retired McCall might lose.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Mini Review: Don't think about the career of McCall too much in the context of US foreign policy ("Are WE the baddies?") and this violent film might be an evening's diversion into the tormented soul of a killer defending good people against bad.
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