Denzel Washington has been playing Robert McCall for a decade now, and the character has aged with him in ways that are quietly interesting. The McCall of The Equalizer 3 is not the coiled, furious instrument of the first film. He is tired. He has found a village in southern Italy that he would like to die in, among people he has come to love, and the film's dramatic question is whether the violence that follows him will allow him that peace.
Antoine Fuqua shoots southern Italy with a warmth that is almost indulgent. The village of Altamonte — a composite of several real locations — is golden and slow and populated with the kind of characters that inhabit a certain type of European crime thriller: the corrupt official, the local restaurateur, the child who attaches herself to the stranger who arrived with a bullet in him. It is not subtle. But it is beautiful.
The Camorra villains are less interesting than the film needs them to be. They are menacing in the abstract but underdeveloped as individuals, which means the film's action sequences lack the personal dimension that made the first Equalizer so satisfying. When McCall finally moves against them, the violence is efficient and brutal, as it always is. But it does not feel earned in the way it once did.
A graceful retirement for a character who deserved one. Not the best of the three. But Washington is incapable of giving a bad performance, and the Italian light is worth the ticket.