The Equalizer 3 (2023)

The third installment in a franchise that has always understood its assignment, The Equalizer 3 finds Robert McCall convalescing in a sun-bleached village on the Amalfi Coast, where the Camorra have begun pressuring shopkeepers and fishermen out of their homes. Antoine Fuqua directs with his customary efficiency, Denzel Washington sits very still and then does not, and the whole enterprise unfolds with the smooth confidence of a machine that has been serviced regularly. It is a fine evening at the cinema. It is not a seminar.

Assessed for contemporary social consciousness, the film registers as a modest specimen. Denzel Washington headlines, Dakota Fanning matches him as a capable CIA officer, and the supporting cast is largely Italian, though none of this is offered as a statement. The film casts well and moves on. Emma Collins earns professional recognition in the closing minutes, a small courtesy to competence that stops well short of any argument. The villains want the village for commercialisation purposes, which supplies a faint whiff of predatory development, but the target is organized crime and never the economic order itself. There are no LGBTQ characters, no climate concerns, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent representation, and no re-framing of real history. Race goes unmentioned entirely. McCall's Blackness is a fact of casting, not a theme.

What remains is lecture energy at its lowest ebb, which is to say the film has no interest in instructing anyone. It wants to show a man snapping forearms and drinking espresso, and it does. The cultural homework is minimal. The pleasure is real. Some evenings, that is the whole transaction.