CLIFT | 'The Equalizer 3' provides a decent plot and picturesque footage

The movie opens with the camera following a car carrying a gray haired man and a boy the right size to be his grandson. They drive through a vineyard and to a large, labyrinthine stone house which the old guy enters. As he walks along he passes dead men, one at a time, until he reaches a room where McCall (Washington) sits with armed guards on either side of him.

But it turns out that our hero is in command of the situation. He gives the older man nine seconds “to decide your fate,” then begins using the gunmen and their arms against them. As McCall leaves this previously undiscovered mafia compound, the grandson shoots him in the back.

He hops a boat to the mainland and is taken to the home of a doctor who sews him up. As McCall recuperates, we see that the coastal village is picturesque and the people friendly. But we continue to wonder what the one man army is doing there.

Then gang members in some way associated with the Sicilian mobsters show up. At first they are only collecting protection money, but they soon become more destructive. And we meet their leader, a man who has plans for the town, but only after the population has been subdued.

Meanwhile, McCall has tipped off a young CIA agent (Dakota Fanning) who uses his information to have the bodies found at the vineyard. She begins to explain some of what is going on with commora activity in the area — drug trafficking is financing even uglier things.

She travels to the village and interviews the still recuperating McCall. “Why did you tip me off?” She wants to know. So does the movie audience, especially as the CIA doesn’t ever seem to have any success in neutralizing the armed thugs operating in the seaside village.

But that doesn’t mean local residents are defenseless. They have a Carabinieri officer in residence, a friendly fellow. When the cosa nostra boys attack him and his young family, they discover he has a supporter for whom they have no answer.

Maybe the village is a little too happy and picturesque. Maybe the people there are too good. The film is, however, enriched by camera shots of its settings. And to give the pictures some action, Fuqua (who directed “Training Day”) throws in a bunch of processions.

There are church parades, processions of law enforcement vehicles, and cavalcades of mobsters on motorcycles or in black cars. Must be half a dozen or more of these. The film has almost as many parades as it has stair-climbing exhibitions of the stages of McCall’s healing.

All this makes a fairly attractive package for revenge action movie-fans. Then, in the end, in an odd and stuttering unwinding of the story, we find out why McCall called Fanning’s character. That is to say, those of us who have followed the Equalizer films find out. Others may be left wondering.