“Equalizer 3”, see Naples and die

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE

The mysterious solitary and invincible vigilante played by Denzel Washington returns to service in Equalizer 3, still signed Antoine Fuqua. This time, the man is in Sicily, in Italy, then in a village near Naples, where he will give a hard time to the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, by ridding the small town which gave him refuge from a band of very nasty “camorrists”.

Less surprising than the first part but less contentious than the second, this third episode feeds on a whole imagery already experienced elsewhere. That of the transalpine television series Gomorrah (2017-2021) and that of tourist leaflets to describe an Italy as both an idyllic place and a banana republic whose police are automatically corrupt and where the CIA, the American intelligence agency, would feel at home.

We know that this saga, inspired by a television series of the 1980s, works on a perpetual questioning, that of the existence of a moral, superior, transcendent order, which would guide the actions of the main character and would enjoin him to restore the justice wherever it is threatened. Armed with this strictly metaphysical justification, the hero of the film can indulge in acts of quite unprecedented brutality in a traditional and inexpensive Hollywood production. The graphic violence that unfolds would almost make Antoine Fuqua’s film a vile exploitation product benefiting from a Series A budget.

What, moreover, characterizes the central character, a sort of new Messiah, is this professionalism, which has become a control, properly fantastic, of space and time allowing him to anticipate, to time preventively all his lethal gestures and to even inform his victims before they are put to death. And it is therefore with a certain jubilation that we witness, during a kind of somewhat crazy climax, a game of massacre during which the hero cuts down, dismembers or decapitates his enemies, in the darkness of the pieces of a sublime palazzo Neapolitan, under the indifferent eye of the statues which constitute its main ornament.