03/09/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Denzel Washington famously resists doing sequels, but this is his third outing as everybody’s favourite vigilante, Robert McCall, and his fifth film with Antoine Fuqua, with whom he won his second Oscar for 2001’s Training Day. (If you’re wondering, the duo’s other collaboration is the much underrated remake of The Magnificent Seven. You’re welcome.)

TE3 takes McCall away from his familiar beat and sets him down in Italy, where he’s exacting his usual unflinching version of comeuppance to an elderly farmer, who is not quite the innocent he appears to be – though what he’s actually done to deserve such retribution is kept a secret until the end. On first appearance, McCall has an almost sepulchral look, as though his endless diet of shooting and punching bad people has taken a terrible toll on him.

On his way out, McCall makes an uncharacteristic mistake and winds up with a bullet in his back, but luck is with him and he winds up being taken care of by Enzo (Remo Girone), a charming small-town doctor who doesn’t ask too many questions and who offers McCall a place to lay his head. Filmed in the impossibly picturesque town of Amalfi, it’s hardly surprising that McCall soon starts thinking that he’s finally found himself a home.

But even impossibly picturesque Italian towns have their crosses to bear and here it’s in the form of Mafia thug Vincent Quaranta (Andrea Scarducio), who has his own heinous plans to transform the sleepy little harbour into a convenient place for shipping off regular consignments of illegal drugs. It soon becomes clear that McCall has some more trash to take out before he can happily retire…

Washington is a fabulous actor, with enough gravitas to elevate material like this and take it to another level – and Fuqua too is a skilled director, who never makes the mistake of allowing the violence in his films to look ‘cool’. The physical exchanges between McCall and those who are foolish enough to underestimate him are unflinchingly visceral and (quite literally) pull no punches.

You could argue that the people McCall comes up against are almost cartoonishly evil and that much of the pleasure in watching these films comes from seeing such creatures given the same rough treatment they’re happy to hand out. But I’d be the first to admit that I enjoy TE3 enormously and, on a giant IMAX screen, Washington’s performance looks even more towering than usual.

There’s also a labyrinthine quality to the plotting here, including a through-line that brings in Dakota Fanning as CIA operative Emma Collins as a key part of the story – and there are brief glimpses (blink and you’ll miss ’em) of characters from the previous instalments. Stay in your seat till the end and all will become clear.

Will there be a TE4? Probably not. It’s unusual for a franchise to make it to a third outing without jumping the shark, so maybe Washington and Fuqua should quit now, while they’re still ahead. Then again, Robert McCall does seem to have an uncanny knack of moving to locations that need his unequivocal style of rough justice. If one arrives, I’ll be there for it.

4 stars

Philip Caveney