God’s Avenger

𝑬𝒒𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒛𝒆𝒓 3 is a non-“faith-based” Christian movie

Equalizer 3 is a fitting conclusion to a memorable movie franchise and unlike many other franchise finales sustains the punch of its predecessors.

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) finds himself in a cozy, close-knit Italian seaside community whose old-world spirit and charm gradually attract him to retirement. He’s just left a trail of dead bodies at a Sicilian winery fronting for Syrian terrorists needing covert storage for a massive shipment of highly potent synthetic street drugs camouflaged in wine crates. McCall anonymously tips off a young CIA agent smartly played by Dakota Fanning (reunited with Washington after their intense performance in 2004’s riveting Man on Fire) with family ties to McCall’s past. She tracks him down and they develop an uneasy friendship.

McCall wants only a peaceful retirement. He won’t get it. The idyllic community that comes to embrace the soft-spoken, enigmatic American is centered around the church and Christian calendar. It also just happens to be a fertile target for the mafia looking to expand its empire of drugs, protection, and prostitution. We later discover the mafia has on its payroll local law enforcement and politicians and has a sinister connection to the Sicilian-Syrian drug operation that McCall has just eviscerated.

When the mafia starts to flex its malevolent muscles in his newly adopted home community, McCall isn’t worried in the least. Like Liam Neeson in The Taken franchise, he has “skills.”

More even than its predecessors, E3 depicts McCall as God’s avenger on the muscular wicked who prey on ordinary virtuous people. McCall is forever looking at the Cross, both with his eyes and his eyes of faith. The Christian symbolism abounds. This is a textbook example of a movie that though not “faith-based” is nonetheless worldview-ishly Christian, much like Mel Gibson’s Signs. This also means, paradoxical though it might sound, that it can be potently Christian in ways that “faith-based” movies cannot. Worldviews are more profound than sermons.

For all their minimalism, the plot, acting, setting, music, and cinematography are maximally impressive. McCall’s unique blend of rugged masculinity with educated, urbane gentlemanliness is a welcome alternative to today’s egalitarian androgynous effeminacy on the one hand and coarse, gauche machismo on the other. There’s no nudity or sex, intact families are glorified, profanity is brief but intense, dignity and courage are valorized, and the Christian Faith is honored everywhere.

In ways that many modern pietists wouldn’t grasp, this is a fierce, violent, tender, heart-felt Christian movie.