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.
When in doubt, just go to Italy. Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua apparently are taking the Adam Sandler/Tom Cruise model of franchise moviemaking and just using the film they’re making as an excuse to travel abroad to the most beautiful places on Earth. If I were Denzel, I would never stop making this Equalizers for that reason alone. 3 follows the same formula as 1 and 2, seeing the charismatic as hell Denzel mowing down bad guys while helping sweet innocent people trying to live simple happy lives.
This time, just in the Amalfi Coast. After laying waste to a mob operation in a Sicilian Winery, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) takes some collateral damage and almost dies. He’s saved by Gio Bonnucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea), unsure if he’s saved a good man or bad man. While healing, Robert stays with Gio in the small town of Altamonte Italy, growing very fond of the nice and loving people who live there. McCall thinks about retiring, but just as he might, fate intervenes in the form of the Italian mafia, who starts shaking down locals and creating general fear among the Altamontians. Seeing how this mafia is probably tied to his winery siege, McCall jumps back into action, and enlists help specifically from CIA operative Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning), who puts together the pieces of the legal puzzle to help bring these bad men to justice.
This movie is exactly as its premise suggests, nothing more or less: Denzel in Italy. He’s as terrifying and engaging as ever as the precise Robert McCall. He can be charming when he wants to be good, and almost a monster when he decides to be bad, only someone like Denzel can pull off. He looks awesome as ever during standoffs in restaurants and Italian Piazzas, defending the nice Italians from the mean Italians (names and faces of anyone else really don’t matter here) in as bloody and vicious way as possible so the bad people stay away forever. And Antoine Fuqua makes sure to shoot the movie star in as breathtaking a way possible to take full advantage of their Italian shooting locations especially at dawn and dusk. Dakota Fanning’s presence is a nice callback to Denzel’s Man on Fire, as he guides the young CIA agent through her first big case and she tries to figure out who the hell this scary but really smart guy is since there’s no history of him anywhere.
And that’s it. This is a great movie to just sit back and watch one of our great movie stars just be the star that he is, in a gorgeous place. By the end, like everyone else, I was planning my next Italy visit, furiously searching where this movie was filmed (Amalfi Coast) so I can sip the same tea in the same piazza as Denzel Washington. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky too and have a stunningly beautiful Italian woman (Sonia Ben Ammar, ok, she’s French Tunisian) want to get to know me better.