The blood-splattered opening sequence of The Equalizer 3 is unacceptable escapism. Since it’s true to the premise of the Equalizer series about former government agent Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) who becomes a freelance executioner, its fans won’t be disappointed. But it’s disheartening to consider what it is they expect from Washington. Where’s the heroic sagacity of For Queen and Country, Malcolm X, Remember the Titans, The Manchurian Candidate, Fences, Roman J. Israel, Esq., or even Macbeth? Washington has forged one of the most schizophrenic careers in Hollywood history, shifting from dignified to badass — mostly badass.

In E3, he plays a man whose thought processes are prelude to devastation, and we all know that this is a consequence of America’s exacerbated racial awareness — the thing that makes a lot of people overrate facile, charismatic Washington as a great actor. Would a truly great actor have to succumb to kick-ass yahoo entertainments? Despite Washington’s singular matinee-idol stature, he’s rarely romantic, though he’s often a two-fisted sexual threat.

Washington’s Robert McCall racializes the ’80s TV series that starred the late white British actor Edward Woodward. (A current reboot stars Queen Latifah in an amusing array of feminizing wigs every week.) Yet, E3’s persistent masculine ideal exploits Washington’s cultural prominence. As generational successor of the Seventies Blaxploitation movement, Washington’s portrayal of stoic, deadly McCall competes with the treacherous combat of the John Wick movies. But this deadly stoicism is not equal; it’s Hollywood equity.

Updating Blaxpoitation-era self-assurance (Shaft, Black Eye, Black Gunn, Black Caesar), McCall is Mr. Indignation, a persona who rings differently in the millennium than Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Bernie Casey did after the civil-rights movement and Sixties riots. McCall’s violence also plays differently, since Washington personified the world’s dirtiest cop in Training Day. Now, McCall’s vigilantism lacks social purpose; it’s just an exercise of audacity. His past as a secret agent (government assassin) prepared him to use violence to level the playing field of the criminal world. Third time around, E3 tells us that this menacing series isn’t about equality; it fits into Hollywood’s Bidenomics and maybe ought to be re-titled The Equity-izer.

Without any moral foundation, this action-movie sequel gives its protagonist (and its audience) the same license to enjoy killing as reckless horror-film sensationalism does. The first scene, the aftermath of a violent bloodbath, exposes the John Wick rip-off. So does each successive battle. The most gruesome is the most ludicrous — either McCall pushing the pressure points in a fiend’s hand (warning of his bowel evacuation) or McCall plunging a pistol into a mafioso’s eye socket. These frights seem designed to match the assault of our current fractured, emotionally violent culture. It links to the murderousness in America’s Democratic-run cities; but unlike Blaxploitation, it justifies social and personal degradation.

At age 68, Washington is too old to play a comic-book-movie superhero (74-year-old Samuel L. Jackson beat him to such ranking in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Washington gets to lend his prestige-movie eminence to the same frivolity that is the specialty of Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Chris Pratt, Jason Statham — but minus Keanu Reeves’s half-satiric John Wick decadence. It may not be refined when Washington does it, but it’s still Hollywood equity.

The pretense of evenhandedness plays out in the plot that takes ex-government agent McCall, presumably on vacation from the treacheries of the U.S., to Europe, where he confronts Italy’s camorra and saves the hide of Dakota Fanning as Emma Collins, a Little Nell white American colleague. Is this great acting? Unless he’s cracking a smile at the pleasantries of Italian peasants, this killing machine seems as robotic as Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.

Some might deliberately avoid seeing the political dread of E3, using the pinhead excuse that director Antoine Fuqua is a not consciously political filmmaker. His filmography confirms it — a potpourri of ephemera from Training Day to King Arthur, from Will Smith’s black-balled Emancipation to E3. Born to the generation behind Washington, 48-year-old Fuqua distorts the shallowest aspects of Seventies Blaxploitation films that mixed racial bitterness with violent social-revenge fantasy. (His solemn slavery epic Emancipation couldn’t live up to its grave historical subject.) And Washington, starring in his fifth Fuqua extravaganza, is also essentially apolitical, no matter how fervently his fans want to think his movies represent some concoction of ethnic and social principles. E3’s equity escapism keeps moviegoers too distracted to define real heroism.