Everyone’s favourite maths-based vigilante (with the possible exception of John Matrix) is back in this anticlimactic threequalizer.

For the final chapter, Bob (Denzel Washington) has quit his job as an Uber driver to become an expat in a hat and full-time Mediterranean murderer. The picture moves Washington to Rome where he takes the expression about doing what the Romans do to its most violent conclusion. Any notion that Bob kills reluctantly goes out the window quicker than Pope John XII.

Following in Rambo‘s bloody footsteps, Antoine Fuqua’s sequels have bludgeoned the initial integrity out of the character. He still sits in a café as in the first movie, but only like a zombie with the muscle memory of that being a place he enjoyed back when he had regular brain function. He is no longer there to read his book, only to wait for when his violent experteas are needed next.

This café-violence-repeat formula sees Bob descend from hero to Nero. He sits drinking coffee while the bad guys do bad guy stuff, then stabs them in tedious, tensionless scenes without even the improvised weaponry that characterised the opening instalment. It is neither action flick nor thriller, reducing the first film’s pulp-with-personality to something indistinguishale from any other Liam Neeson, Stallone or Netflix filler. If that’s what it means by equalizing then job well done.

The other reason for Bob’s spending so much time in the café is his relationship with the obligatory 30-year-younger waitress (Gaia Scodellaro), who concernedly asks Bob: “Who cooks for you?” It is almost impressive to paint such a sexist male fantasy and national stereotype of an Italian woman in just four words. Suffice to say The Equalizer 3 never reaches that level of efficiency again.