The third film in The Equalizer series begins with a sequence that harkens back to the ceremonial ultra-violence of the first two instalments. Without any immediate context, we follow an Italian man and boy as they drive through the bucolic countryside to a palatial vineyard estate, only to realise, as soon as they enter the gates, that something is very wrong. Upon seeing the corpses of henchmen splayed about the courtyard, the man instructs the boy to remain in the car and then makes his way through the building, encountering one grotesquely killed bodyguard after another. Most of them have been injured in the eyes and face, evoking an extravagant kill scene as the man finally arrives at the centre of the estate, where he finds Robert McCall, played by Denzel Washington, waiting for him. While Robert kills this man, who turns out to be Lorenzo Vitale, a Mafia enforcer, and makes his way back to the courtyard, he is gunned down by the boy in the car and barely manages to drive away, eventually collapsing in his car on the side of the road at Altamonte, on the Amalfi Coast. There, he is taken in by a kindly doctor and police officer who gradually nurse him to health.
So dramatic and climactic is this opening sequence that it plays both as a summary of the Equalizer aesthetic to date and as an exhaustion of it, signalling that we will be in for a considerably more burnished experience than Fuqua’s first two films, as entertaining as they were. With the violence and action out of the way, Fuqua suffuses this third part of the triptych with a lyrical and elegiac sense of place, offering us a recuperation and then a retirement narrative in which Robert simply spends the first act taking in his surroundings, which he regards with a contemplative tone, making for one of Denzel’s most muted and introspective performances in some time. As Robert settles into the ebb and flow of the remarkably atmospheric town of Altamonte, a tiered fantasia tucked into a cosy nook of the coastline, he discovers the bucolic haven he has been searching for his entire career. Whether he’s watching old films being projected onto even older buildings, or bonding with the old woman who shares his steps (and for the first part of the film, his infirmities), he gradually integrates into the community, echoing the pastoral overtones of The Godfather Part III. Bathing us in that languorous world, Fuqua builds suspense almost subliminally, taking one of Robert’s mantras as the basis of his style: “I believe that everything in life is about timing.”
When the criminals do emerge, then, they’re not just an affront to Robert’s morals but to his retirement, along with the entire mellifluous mood of the opening act. To capture that rupture, Fuqua draws on a gradual deglamourisation of the Mafia that has taken place in Italian film and television over the last decade and a half, from Gomorrah to Dogman to The Good Mothers. From the perspective of the present, this devolution of the Mafia feels like Italian screen culture’s way of gesturing towards the emergence of a neofascist Italy, one in which the Mafia have simply become extensions of an austere and bullying government. Certainly, in The Equalizer 3, the Mafia are nothing more than merciless property developers seeking to strip the Amalfi Coast of its organic communities by transforming it into a continuum of resorts, hotels and casinos. Unlike the classical Mafia (at least the classical Mafia of cinema) they take it for granted that citizens are collateral damage and have no problems disposing of children, the elderly, or the disabled in order to keep their “tenants” in check. They’re also shorn of even the most residual fraternity, charisma or community-mindedness, leaching out the palette of the film much as they seek to decimate the Italian public sphere.
In other words, the Mafia of Fuqua’s film are simply domestic terrorists – and it is through terrorism that we finally make the link back to the opening vineyard scene. For it turns out that the head of the Mafia, whose mantra is “I can take anything I want,” has been purchasing drugs from a jihadist group who in turn use the money to buy the weapons needed to blow up a train station in Rome. The Mafia effectively funds a terrorist attack on Italian soil, much as one of its members boasts that they possess enough heroin to kill everyone in Naples. Even these grand gestures don’t elevate them to antiheroes though, since Fuqua and Robert both regard them with an economy and austerity that mitigates against grand gestures and hubris, perhaps because this new wave of organised crime has benefited so directly from the austerity that also ushered in neofascism. Between Robert’s idyllic retirement and the cold terrorism of the Mafioso, The Equalizer 3 lurches between the fantasy and reality of modern-day Italy in the same way as Catherine Hardwicke’s Mafia Mamma, a film that offers Italian fantasy in the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun but punctuates it with periodic ultra-violence.
Most importantly, perhaps, The Equalizer 3 demolishes any residual link between the Mafia and the Catholic ethos of Italy. Whereas the Mafioso of The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos cloaked themselves in exotic Catholic hubris, Fuqua’s film ends by splitting these two worlds into quite discrete camps. In a burnished final scene, Fuqua cuts between Robert making his way to the core of the head Mafioso’s house, which is lit only by the glow of fire on ancient walls and statues, and the villagers of Altamonte making a Catholic procession towards the sea. The quilting-point, or perhaps more accurately the dispersal-point, between these two sequences occurs when Robert makes a point of destroying the stained glass ceiling of the Madonna in the head Mafioso’s house, thereby severing the link between Catholicism and the Mafia once and for all. If anything, Robert becomes the patron saint of the village, much as this extraordinary final sequence, all flame and marble, exudes the luminous clarity of a parable or passion play. Only in the final shots does some semblance of vivid colour enter Fuqua’s mise-en-scenes, as we cut to the village rejoicing in the blue flags and smoke of a football win, Robert’s retirement and revenge complete – an elegant ending to one of the most evocative action films of the year, and one of the highest points in Fuqua’s filmography.