I dont understand the positive reviews of this movie, it lacks the interest and depth of the first and second movie.
While the first movies villain was cartoonishly evil, what was happening around them is interesting, the way their depravity is depicted as well as their competence makes them a threat. Here the villains are too easily despatched. its so easy for our protagonist, Robert McCall, to the point we just are really watching gruesome murders by a sadist. At another point after our protagonist is established as ruthless to evildoers, he gives them a chance when he would not give them a chance and it would be insane to do so resulting in a character we are meant to like but hasnt been given the screen time to like can have a heart wrenching emotional death. Its like they used some narrative shorthand to tell us to think "you are meant to like this person, they are good and have a family, they are dead, time to be sad"
The worst thing is the way the CIA waltz in and help Italy sort out their problems with drugs, they can just decide its their job and do it no problem. In reality the CIA have a long history of literally causing countries problems with drugs, its been a way to fund terrorists that have the same enemies the US has. Like Iran contra for instance. Here instead of the CIA doing it the gangsters help terrorists fund their activities through drug trafficking, but we dont know what the terrorists want or anything. Syrians just like blowing things up apparently. Its like they took the script out of the oven too early before establishing motivation. The Camorra and other organised crime in italy have plenty of ways of profiting from drug sales without it being a new thing involving terrorists bombing Italy when Italy isnt involved in any anti muslim wars or anything.
There are these lines in it from the protagonist about why take the drugs in through the most secure port in the region, and by identifying where the drugs go next they act like that explains why the drugs come in through that port, its implied this is clever, butwe arent told why its clever, its irrelevant to anything. Its just so a CIA protege of McCall can repeat what he said and is seen as smart by her colleagues for whatever was meant to be clever about that.
There is a scene early on where the protagonist is shot in the back by a child of a gangster McCall killed. I think there was a version of the script where he killed the child instinctively and then had massive guilt, or perhaps we got to see the childs response to the death of the parent they loved. Because McCall is implied to be having a moral crisis and that would make sense of their moral crisis, but it was written out of the script i think, out of cowardice.
Nothing really makes sense if you think about it.
Even though the action scenes are good, they are only there to establish McCall is superhuman, everyone strides up to him so he can take their gun away, its just lazy really.