Bloody Action and Dour-Sour from Two of Hollywood’s Finest

Denzel Washington and Kenneth Branagh are two of the finest actors working the craft. Be it on stage or screen, they have earned so many accolades it’s difficult to keep count. For the record, between them, they have received 17 Oscar nods and four little gold statues just from the Academy alone.

Both are back in theaters fronting third chapters in two, well-worn movie franchises that probably won’t win them any more awards, but likely will fatten their wallets a bit. Washington returns as shadowy avenger Robert McCall in Equalizer 3 (R), re-imagining a character played over the years by English thespian Edward Woodward and American entertainer Queen Latifah. Branagh dons the flamboyant mustache and Belgian accent of Agatha Christie’s iconic super-sleuth, Hercule Poirot, offering us his take of a character memorably performed by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet, among others, in A Haunting in Venice (PG-13). In a strange coincidence, both films are set on opposite shores in Italy, offering us picturesque backgrounds to all the violent histrionics going on. Let’s check out Denzel’s Italian adventure first.

E3 begins with McCall in Sicily getting some payback for an American family swindled of their life savings by an Italian mobster. If you’re familiar with the franchise in any of its various versions, you know that’s kind of McCall’s thing – balancing the scales of justice for the weak and oppressed. Like Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills in the Taken series, Washington’s McCall is a man with a particular set of skills who leaves a trail of bodies in his wake, most of them dispatched with his own two hands in lightning-quick bursts of violence.

He’s injured during his Sicilian escapade and found unconscious along a highway on the Amalfi Coast by a compassionate Carabinieri (Eugenio Mastrandreo), who transports him to his family physician in the very scenic mountain village of Altomonte, where he is nursed back to health, pretty much no questions asked. This leads to an interesting Zen-like exchange between McCall and the doctor (Remo Girone), who tells McCall that he must be a good man because he doesn’t claim to be a good man, which therefore makes him a good man and an honest one, too. This series doesn’t need the John Wick mythologizing, but whatever.

While he’s recuperating, McCall wanders the village, learning some of the language, enjoying some of the customs and meeting many of the people. It’s all idyllic until he catches the vibe that this picture-postcard little town is being terrorized by the Camorra, a particularly vicious strain of the Mafia, in bed with a nasty Middle-East cartel intent on attacking the U.S. Even the police are powerless to stop the bad guys. You can pretty much guess who’s going to step up and what’s going to happen from there.

Director Antoine Fuqua, who directed the two previous installments as well as Training Day – which earned Washington his second Academy Award – knows how to stage violent action, and what he stages here is both very graphic and bloody. He also knows how to coax memorable performances from his large cast, which includes Dakota Fanning (who worked with Washington when she was just a kid in Man on Fire) as a young CIA operative enlisted to figure out why so many suspected members of a terrorist cult are turning up dead, seemingly at the hands of one man.

E3 probably isn’t for everybody’s taste, but if yours runs to bloody action flicks, you can’t do much better than this one.

A Haunting in Venice, which, like Branagh’s two previous Poirot adaptations – Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile – is also directed by him, closely adheres to the Christie playbook: assemble a large cast of eccentric characters (this one including Michelle Yeoh, Kelly Reilly, Jamie Dornan, and Tina Fey), isolate them in a distinctive setting (here, a crumbling palazzo on the Grand Canal reputed to be haunted), and then count the bodies as they drop – until Poirot assembles the survivors to explain the inexplicable.

There are certainly pleasures to be found in this movie, adapted from a late-career 1969 novel titled Hallowe’en Party. Last year’s Best Actress winner Michelle Yeoh seems to be having fun playing notorious clairvoyant Joyce Reynolds, hired by Reilly’s fidgety opera diva Rowena Drake, to contact the spirit of her dead daughter on Halloween night. Tina Fey, too, seems all in as the wise-cracking American novelist and erstwhile “friend of Hercule” Ariadne Oliver, who wants the fabled detective to expose Madame Reynolds as the fraud she suspects her to be.

However, in attempting to juice this slight story for some supernatural chills and thrills, director Branagh nearly drains the movie of humor and life. Things plod along from dark hallway to dreary bedchamber to sinister cellar, intermittently lit by the thunderstorm raging outside, without giving us much chance to relish the characters or that remarkable Venetian scenery. Even the great detective himself, so lively and mischievous aboard a train and cruise ship, seems equal parts dour and sour walking through this case.

Sadly, A Haunting in Venice is haunted by my memory of Branagh’s two previous excursions, which were a lot more fun than this one.

Both the movies are currently in theaters, but you can expect to find them streaming later this fall, E3 on Netflix and Haunting on Hulu.

In another lifetime, Mike Orlock wrote film reviews for the Reporter/Progress newspapers in the western suburbs of Chicago. He has also taught high school English, coached basketball and authored three books of poetry. He finished his two-year term as Door County’s poet laureate in early 2023.