This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
It is always a pleasure to see Denzel Washington on the big screen. Especially when it comes to him kicking butt like a boss. The Equalizer 3 is the third installment of the Equalizer series, now a trilogy. We have seen our fair share of solo action films this year with John Wick 4, Extraction 2, Sisu and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. So going into this movie, I was already a little burnt out. I still wanted to give it a fair shot though since I didn’t mind the previous two movies.
Denzel Washington returns as Robert McCall and has been enjoying his life in a small seaside town in Italy. However, everything changes, and he is once again brought back into the world of crime when he has a run-in with a small Italian mafia family. He has to gain support with the locals and a little help from the CIA in order to prevent this mob from wreaking havoc across Italy.
There were definitely some ups and downs to this movie ranging from acting to cinematography. Denzel is great as always and he was accompanied with fantastic performances from Dakota Fanning, Gaia Scodellaro, David Denman and Andrea Scarduzio.
Some of these names were unknown to me and I found their performances to be pretty decent for not little-known actors and actresses. Are they Oscar worthy? No. But it did bring up my rating for the film. It seemed like they all poured their hearts out. Sometimes it was a little too much but at times it was perfect. I tend to lean towards giving the new actors the benefit of the doubt and giving them a chance and I am glad it turned out the way it did with this movie.
One of the slight problems I had with The Equalizer 3 was its pacing. The first quarter of the movie was setting up the scene and there was an opening scene that just dragged on. I bring this up because towards the end of the movie, everything seemed to just happen all at once with no real explanation and build up.
It was a satisfying ending, but I just wished they did a little bit more with it. The story was decent and didn’t seem all over the place, but it just wasn’t spread evenly throughout the movie.
It also seemed like more than half of The Equalizer 3 was in subtitles. I really love foreign films and there’s nothing against them, but I was walking into this movie expecting it to be like the previous two films. When done well, like last year’s best picture winner Everything, Everywhere All at Once, blending languages can be great. Here, it just felt jarring.
Final Thoughts
I rate the third installment of The Equalizer trilogy equally with the previous two. It wasn’t anything special, the scenery was very nice, and the action sequences were satisfying. There were obviously a couple things that could have improved but overall, it was a solid movie that I stayed interested in. I highly recommend this film if you like solo action films and enjoy a quick film about revenge.
