109 min | R | September 1, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Robert McCall settles on the Amalfi Coast and finds something he never had. Then the Camorra come for the town. Retirement does not suit a man who counts in seconds.
Robert McCall is done. He kills his way out of a Sicilian vineyard, takes a bullet in the back, and washes up in a small town on the Amalfi Coast. A local doctor stitches him together. McCall heals slowly and falls for the place and the people in it. The film is about a violent man trying to earn a home he has not paid for in blood, and what happens when the local crime family makes that bill come due.
Denzel Washington plays McCall with stillness that does most of the work. He sits in a cafe, orders tea, watches the square, and the menace lives entirely in how little he moves. The performance is patience weaponized. Dakota Fanning plays CIA officer Emma Collins, and her scenes with Washington carry a quiet warmth that pays off in a reveal the film holds back. Eugenio Mastrandrea plays the local cop Gio Bonucci as a decent man cornered by the Camorra. Andrea Scarduzio plays the mobster Vincent Quaranta with oily entitlement, and Remo Girone gives the town elder Enzo Arisio real dignity.
Antoine Fuqua directs his third McCall film and finally lets the man rest. The script by Richard Wenk keeps the plot thin on purpose and trades the franchise’s urban grime for postcard light. Robert Richardson shoots the coastal town in warm gold and deep shadow, and the contrast makes the violence land harder when it arrives. Fuqua stages the kills in tight, brutal bursts and cuts away fast, so the brutality registers as fact rather than spectacle. The score stays restrained until the town is threatened, then leans into dread.
This is the trilogy closing on its own terms. The plot is a formula and Fuqua knows it. He spends his energy on the texture of the place and the weight of Washington’s presence instead. The result is a comfortable, satisfying farewell that asks nothing new of McCall and delivers exactly what it promises.