Vigilante justice finale subdued

Vigilante justice finale subdued

This effective but oddly downbeat action threequel sees enigmatic avenger Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) resting up in an Italian coastal town after suffering a life-threatening injury on an incredibly gory retrieval op in Sicily.

The Equalizer franchise, which was first an ’80s TV show (with Edward Woodward), then a movie series and recently a TV show again (this time with Queen Latifah), has always offered viewers a deal: Suspend your disbelief — like, a lot — and you’ll be rewarded with the satisfying spectacle of justice done.

In The Equalizer, bad people are punished, good people prevail and ethical issues of means and ends aren’t looked into too closely.

At least until now.

The movies — penned by Richard Wenk, directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and starring Washington — follow a retired government assassin as he attempts to atone for the bad he’s done by using his “very particular set of skills,” as they say in the business, to do some good.

In the 2014 kickoff film, Robert battled the Russian mob; in the second outing, he had some this-time-it’s-personal business involving rogue CIA agents. In this third movie, he’s taking on the Camorra crime organization in southern Italy, which means the setting is breathtaking, everyone is better dressed — even the thugs, maybe especially the thugs — and there’s an abundance of Catholic symbolism.

That Catholic symbolism comes in handy because — in what the trailer has billed as “the last chapter” for this world-weary action man — Robert is reckoning with age, mortality and sin. (“We all must face Death,” he remarks moodily, in subtitled Italian, at one point.)

As he recovers from the film’s ultraviolent cold open, he has time to brood about Big Questions and he seems to be wondering whether putting wine bottles through eye sockets and corkscrews through necks — even in the service of doing right — is perhaps taking a toll.

Now, deepening moral sense is generally a good thing, in cinema and life, but I’m not sure it really works with this series, where you just want to enjoy some bloody good vigilante justice.

Equalizer fans will still find some of their favourite tropes. Robert still likes to use a stopwatch when he’s dispatching henchmen with whatever comes to hand. He still likes to give even the most wicked of men a chance to change their fate and do the right thing. (Spoiler alert: they never do.) He’s still very fussy about the placement of napkins and spoons.

But certain things are missing. Part of the series’ appeal has been that Robert is such an anonymous and unlikely hero — just a middle-aged guy from Boston working at a big-box hardware store or doing shifts as a Lyft driver. He lives in a spartan apartment, reads Hemingway and usually takes on a low-stakes side project that involves mentoring some young person — getting them to eat right, stay in school, stop using curse words.

Here, he is the mysterious stranger come to town, and Robert — or Roberto, as he’s called by his new friends — is very soon pulled into a big and unusually bleak situation. The Camorra is an incurable cancer, as one character tells him.

Wenk’s script sometimes feels tonally off. Sure, you expect violence in an Equalizer movie, loads of violence, but some of the scenes involving civilians come off as unnecessarily ugly, such as a sequence involving threats to a child.

There’s a bit of a villain vacuum. The Italian mobsters, along with being murderers, arsonists and extortionists are, ugh, also real estate developers, but the head of the crime family, Vincent Quaranta (Andrea Scarduzio), doesn’t really register as a worthy antagonist.

A badly integrated subplot involving a CIA operative (Dakota Fanning), terrorists and the international drug trade feels distracting.

Fuqua, usually known for lots of visual and aural energy and splash, is also a bit subdued. There are some truly baroque kills, but after that attention-getting opening, there are no standout sustained action set-pieces.

Washington delivers — the man is an Oscar winner, after all — with low-key gravitas and a convincing sense of power held in reserve. But, like his character, he seems to sense that he’s coming to the end of this particular road.

For this iteration of Robert McCall, the third movie feels like the right place to stop.

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