"I understand weakness, pain, death, and suffering. Because of these people, I'm beginning to understand real peace."
Denzel Washington is as watchable as ever as he reunites with Training Day and Magnificent Seven director Antoine Fuqua to bring their Robert McCall - aka The Equalizer - trilogy to a close.
Too soon...
This Western via A Place in the Sun finds the retired CIA agent turned freelance righter of wrongs pitching up in Southern Italy, where the residents of a small town need to be rescued from the clutches of the Mafia.
In their fifth film together, Washington and Fuqua are in no hurry to get to the karmic carnage, and Equalizer 3 is all the better because of that. In a neat bit of USP, Dakota Fanning, Washington's nine-year-old co-star in the 2004 revenge thriller Man on Fire, arrives on the scene.
Once again, it's the little moments of Washington doing his thing as a lonely man looking for a reason to be that mean the most. With his bond with Fuqua and, indeed, Fanning now stretching back over two decades, they all know how to bring out the best in each other.
Here, there is a real poignancy in watching the now-68-year-old Washington playing a character he first portrayed back in 2014 (and again in 2018). Despite living very different lives, 'it's later than you think' has as much relevancy for the audience as it does McCall.
Big questions asked and bear poked, the action arrives in the second half - McCall dispatching all comers with as much variety as ferocity. This is the goriest movie in the series - think the office encounter from the first film and then some - with nothing toned down à la the Taken sequels.
Taking away from the enjoyment somewhat is the choice of lead villain, who feels better suited to the role of consigliere than mastermind. When you're bringing the curtain down, you need the strongest and scariest possible adversary: Marton Csokas as Russian mobster Nicolai Itchenko in The Equalizer retains that charcoal crown.
With a paucity of new thrillers available as the seasons change, Equalizer 3 is a safe bet and, like its predecessors, has that holster-the-remote quality that will guarantee a healthy hereafter when it pops up on screens at home.
Above all, it shows that there's more life in this franchise yet.
