Though the latest John Wick installment included way too much plot for its own good, it still stuck to the tenet that has made it an enduring series: Everything serves the violent set pieces, which are long, abundant, and varied. The last movie in the Equalizer series suffers from the same problem and while the set pieces have the same nasty efficiency as those in the Wick flicks, the setups are convoluted and not entirely convincing. It would have been better, for example, to jettison the whole CIA subplot, which justifies much of the action but is poorly thought out.

Our hero, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), is out of Boston for once and in Italy for reasons that don’t become clear until well into the story (and even then I had big questions). He first appears at a Sicilian vineyard, surrounded by a dozen dead bodies when the proprietor shows up with a small boy. Apparently, the proprietor is the target, but since McCall’s brief as a former government operative turned vigilante requires he kills to even a score for a victimized innocent, we have to wonder what all this carnage is for, but in any case, after doing his job in the usual no-nonsense manner, McCall drops his guard and gets shot. Somehow, he makes it to the Amalfi coast where he’s rescued, unconscious, by a local policeman (Eugenio Mastrandrea), who has obviously encountered such matters before, and takes him to a local physician (Remo Girone), who patches him up without asking too many questions. The reason for this reticence becomes obvious once McCall undergoes his long rehabilitation in the scenic town of Altamonte, where the people are humble and kind and the Camorra lords it over them with a brutal protection racket that they plan to expand. Though not called upon to act, McCall takes it upon himself to become a one-man Seven Samurai and save the town from these devils, and he does it, per his titular moniker, with the same measure of brutality that the bad guys dish out to the people they exploit. Unlike in Wick, the killings have an emotional element owing to the fact that we get to know the assholes being dispatched and thus feel delight at their bloody demise. 

It’s worth mentioning Dakota Fanning as the local CIA agent who tracks down McCall after investigating the massacre at the vineyard, which turns out to be a front for terrorist financing, but for the most part she’s a distraction that doesn’t merit much attention, especially when the original reason for McCall’s “equalizing” is finally explained and feels like nothing more than an after-thought. Though director Antoine Fuqua has become adept at this kind of mayhem he can’t do much with a script so poorly structured that it renders the action set pieces as interchangeable, with no sense of buildup as the movie progresses. 

In English and Italian. Opens Oct. 6 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). 

The Equalizer 3 home page in Japanese