This Denzel Washington Thriller is A Slasher Movie in Disguise
Editor’s Note: This piece features heavy *spoilers* for The Equalizer 3.
Correction: An edit was made to include Washington’s role in Fallen.
It’s easy to see why Denzel Washington is one of the most accomplished names in the business. The Academy Award-winning actor has worked with filmmaking giants like Spike Lee, Tony Scott, and Jonathan Demme, and yet one of his most interesting screen relationships lies with director Antoine Fuqua. For over two decades, the pair have worked on five projects together, including Training Day, (which led Washington to his second Oscar), The Magnificent Seven, and the Equalizer trilogy. The greatest distinction about that last one is that prior to The Equalizer 2, Washington had never done a sequel to any of his projects before. What’s even crazier to think about is that he’s never starred in a horror film, barring the occult crime thriller Fallen. That is, until The Equalizer 3.
Action and horror have different rules associated with them, yet they share some deadly commonalities. Action heroes, especially ones with a violent past, are traditionally equipped with a pre-loaded body count. There’s an allure to watching a force of nature like John Wick annihilating every assassin on the planet in the same manner as Jason Voorhees slaughtering camp counselors. The deviation, however, lies in the presentation.
You typically root for the action hero to overcome their antagonistic obstacles through bloody means, whereas the slasher villain is met with fear and a desire to be defeated. The kills in a Friday the 13th movie are fun to watch, yes. But at the end of the day, you’re not rooting for Jason to kill Tommy Jarvis, or for Ghostface to kill Sidney Prescott. However, in The Equalizer 3, Washington’s Robert McCall is a fascinating blend of the two in a film that acts as a slasher flick through the looking glass.
A History of Violence
While loosely based on the mid-’80s television series of the same name, the Equalizer films share the same general premise. A government operative leaves the dangerous life behind and spends the rest of his days working in the interest of the people. If someone feels like they’re backed against a wall, he’s the person to get in touch with. Where Edward Woodward’s McCall was a retired spy for a fictional government agency, Washington’s McCall is a former Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant turned ex-CIA black ops operative.
In 2014’s The Equalizer, we learn that McCall had faked his own death in order to live a peaceful life with his wife, Vivienne (Enku Guabie). But after her passing, which is never really elaborated on, he carves out a quiet slice of home in Boston, Massachusetts, while working a simple day job at a hardware store. No one really knows the extent of his dark side, besides a few industry friends (Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman) who are passingly aware of his re-emergence. McCall lives alone, catering to his environments to match his neat and orderly OCD tendencies.
He manages to keep his skills a secret, that is, until makes friends with Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young sex worker under the violent thumb of the Russian mafia. Seeing her casual mistreatment reawakens this internal storm that had laid dormant. The tension doesn’t really come from his own personal danger, so much as from the people around him. By film’s end, he vows to continue using his abilities to further serve his community.
We see McCall roughing up gangsters throughout, but the finale shows a much different face of this character. The big bad lures McCall out to the hardware store where he works, upon which he’s greeted by a phantom of sorts. His men aren’t killed or disposed of; they are slaughtered like something out of a horror movie. Imagine you’re a mafia stooge walking through a spacious Home Depot with all of the lights off, and being yanked up to the highest shelf via a barbed wire noose, all while the person who crafted it stares into your soul. This is who McCall really is, no matter how hard he tries to convince himself that he can have a normal life.
The Equalizer 2, meanwhile, is kind of an odd duckling. Although McCall does take out a number of people who wronged him in a manner of bloody ways, the film takes on a less grimy aesthetic that makes it feel noticeably distant from the first. That said, there is a scene where McCall blasts a mercenary with a massive harpoon gun through the face. In both cases, Washington offers small glimpses into this character’s dark psyche amid traditional action hero trademarks.
But the grisly opening of The Equalizer 3 signals a much darker outing that gives us the most complete picture of who McCall is.
Once Upon a Time in a Sicilian Winery…
Fuqua inverts our expectations right off the bat. Lorenzo Vitale (Bruno Bilotta), a Sicilian crime lord, arrives at his secluded winery to find mutilated bodies waiting for him at the front gate. Walking through the blood-stained estate, he’s greeted by a body with a meat cleaver lodged in what was once someone’s face. Around every corner, there’s a body lying in a pool of blood. A good portion of them are obscured in shadows as if they barely escaped the wrath of darkness before they collapsed. Wine bottles, knives, whatever weapon could be used was used. You would think that this is a brilliant way to introduce the casual brutality of the film’s villain.
It settles in pretty quickly, however, that this bloodshed is the handiwork of our skilled protagonist. McCall is found sitting between two shaken men holding him at gunpoint, and all while he casually ignores them. They’re scared shitless and rightly so. McCall makes it clear to Lorenzo in a low whisper that the killing spree was merely to get inside and offer him the chance to give back stolen funds. When the crime lord seems intent on becoming another corpse on the pile, the winery slasher leaps from his chair, blasts one goon, stabs the other with a pistol, and then proceeds to fire said pistol while it’s still sticking out of the back of his head. For good measure, Lorenzo gets a shotgun blast to the ass, followed by a mercy blast to the head.
There are maybe 20+ bodies strewn throughout the place and despite the overwhelming flow of spilled blood, wine, and tears, McCall simply sits back down to continue cleaning his ring as if nothing had happened. It’s not uncommon for some action heroes to show casual indifference to their killing spree, but McCall takes it to another level. Washington’s expressions show that we’re about to spend the next hour and a half in the company of a character whose violent tendencies are no longer simmering. They’re unnervingly vigilant.
The Equalizer 3: The Inverse of the Slasher Flick
A good portion of The Equalizer 3 isn’t based in action but in McCall building relationships with the people of Altomonte, a coastal Italian villa. They nurse him back to health after finding him with a bullet in his leg and never ask about the nasty business at the winery that led him to them. A local restauranteur named Aminah (Gaia Scodellaro) even offers to personally cook him a home meal. For the first time in a long time, there’s the promise of a better life with the time he has left. McCall doesn’t admire Altamonte—he cherishes it. You have that classic Denzel charm coming out through his generous affection for community, which makes his violent turns even more effective.
In some ways, The Equalizer 3 sees Fuqua playing with another genre: the Western. McCall is the archetypal lone cowboy waltzing into town as the savior with perfect timing, as much as he is the aging rider coming to the end of the line. A melancholy hangs over him, even in moments when he faces an obstacle in his way. He’s not a reluctant hero, so much as a tired one. He wants peace and never seems to find it. Naturally, just as McCall starts to call this place home, Vincent Quaranta (Andrea Scarduzio), head of the vicious Camorra gang, rears his ugly head.
Vincent’s introduction sees him and his goons emptying a building full of tenants to make way for his new hotel. When its owner refuses to sell, their ailing wheelchair-bound grandfather is immediately launched through a window with a noose around his neck for everyone to see. Vincent instructs his goons to leave the corpse dangling for the townspeople to see should they think of dissenting against him. The Camorra are essentially funneling money into terrorist attacks to further build their empire. The violence in The Equalizer 3, on both accounts, is disturbing and outlandish. For example, there’s a brutal scene later in the film where the police chief shows some pushback to Vincent’s plans and leaves the Camorra headquarters with his severed hand sticking out of an ice bucket.
Think of what drives Jason Voorhees to kill. Camp Crystal Lake is his domain, his safe space, and god help anyone who disturbs it. Altomonte is practically McCall’s Crystal Lake. Much like the offerings to Jason, the Camorra are glorified bodies gift-wrapped for an appointment with death. Unlike most slasher victims, this slice of the Italian mafia unequivocally deserves their fates. You may feel compelled to view McCall through the lens of an antihero for that reason, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Antiheroes are oftentimes purveyors of justice who lack a human center when it comes to hurting or even killing their antagonists. In some ways, McCall acts as a stand-in for a character like the Punisher, who leaves a trail of death in his wake. But it’s the way in which Fuqua and DP Robert Richardson shoot Washington that’s undoubtedly horror-coded. It plays like a slasher movie in reverse.
Wrath of an American Phantom
Throughout The Equalizer 3, Washington is dressed entirely in black. Although Washington’s performance shows glimpses of humanity, there’s a calming intensity that exists behind his eyes. He watches like a hungry shark who strikes at the first sight of spilled blood. Even during his recovery process, Richardson shoots Washington as a towering force by way of consistent low angles.
When a shop owner witnesses his business burning to the ground, his wails are accentuated by McCall, who lurks behind the crowd like an angel of death who’s been handed the next souls to retrieve. To the outside world, he’s a specter who occasionally rises out of the underworld to dispatch his swift and brutal sense of justice, however he sees fit. Composer Marcelo Zarvos’ haunting score even bestows McCall with the kind of musical motif—a mix of heavy metal and wailing synth with a hint of melancholy—that feels like it belongs in a horror movie.
The camera lingers on McCall’s string of bodies, not with the triumphant gaze of defeating evil, but with a sense of revulsion. He doesn’t even wait for Vincent to return to Altomonte. Instead, he launches a sneak attack in the middle of the night. Vincent’s death isn’t quick either. He’s injected with a harrowing amount of his own drug supply, with McCall silently trailing him on his way out of this life. For the briefest of seconds, you almost feel sorry for these evil assholes.
I found it interesting, however, that McCall is a killer who’s aware of his violent transgressions but isn’t quite sure of whether he’s a good man anymore. It’s not often you see a slasher villain grappling with the textual meaning of the self, and ultimately embracing their sociopathic tendencies as a means to an end. The best example of this is when McCall reflects on the men he killed in the winery, but from his perspective. We see the carnage he unleashed through POV shots that come straight out of a Halloween movie, one of which has to be an homage to that moment in John Carpenter’s film when young Michael Myers repeatedly stabs Judith. He even does a Myers head tilt, while staring into the eyes of a Camorra gangster with zero remorse.
When it comes time for compiling the year’s best horror films, you likely won’t find The Equalizer 3 on most lists. But it’ll likely be included in mine.
Categorized:Editorials
