Denzel Washington movies

Chris: Let’s talk about Denzel. When did we first discover him?

Amon: For me, it was The Preacher’s Wife.

Chris: Start with the best.

Amon: It took me a while to get into Peak Denzel, to discover Training Day and Malcolm X and He Got Game and what have you. But The Preacher’s Wife is still a movie I really enjoy watching. Helen: I probably saw The Pelican Brief and Philadelphia early on. But Much Ado About Nothing is probably the Denzel film I’ve seen the most times, because my baby sister got obsessed with it.

Nick: Pelican Brief was the first proper one. It’s not a great film. But even when it’s a mediocre film, he delivers, right?

Helen: The Pelican Brief is a good example of a Denzel Washington film in some ways, because it’s a film that is entirely dependent on star power. A lot of his films are basically sold on, “This dude’s really frickin’ charismatic.”

Amon: Mid-tier Denzel is better than a whole bunch of movies. 2 Guns and Safe House are very watchable movies.

Chris: But we’re here to talk about the great movies in his career.

Helen: Does that mean we can leave aside The Taking Of Pelham 123?

Chris: That’s a movie I like. It’s one of the five movies he made with Tony Scott. Nick: He made two films about trains with Tony Scott. Amon: Unstoppable is easily the superior of the two.

Nick: It’s a fun movie.

Chris: Déjà Vu is not good. It’s so muddled. The script is not great.

Nick: I would argue that the car chase, where one car is in the past and one is in the present, is a really good example of one great scene in a pretty bad film.

Chris: Crimson Tide, for me, is the best Denzel Washington movie.

Amon: Seeing him go toe-to-toe with Gene Hackman is just awesome. I wish it happened more in his filmography. Any time he goes toe-to-toe with an actor close

to his calibre, it works like gangbusters. Fences, with Viola Davis. Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks. Glory, some of the scenes he has with Morgan Freeman are really great. But the peak is Crimson Tide.

Helen: He’s best when he has someone to bounce off.

Chris: He straddled two sides of Tony Scott’s career. But they maybe didn’t take as many risks creatively as in Denzel’s partnership with Spike Lee. Helen: Malcolm X is the towering example of that. It’s an incredible piece of filmmaking from Spike Lee, and I think it’s head and shoulders above every other performance on this list.

Amon: He took almost a year off to get into Malcolm’s mindset. Typically with films like that I’m not a fan of the whole ‘cradle to the grave’ aspect. But the performance is so good. To play Malcolm at three different stages of his life is incredible.

Chris: The film of theirs that connected with me most was He Got Game. I thought it was an absolutely beautiful story about a father and son reconnecting, and found it very moving.

Nick: Mo’ Better Blues has him at his most playful, I think. It’s a different side of him that you don’t see very often.

Chris: They haven’t worked together since 2006. Come on. Get it together. But he’s won two Oscars — one for Glory, one for Training Day. That was Antoine Fuqua’s first movie, for Christ’s sake.

Nick: You could say it was his training film.

Amon: I love Training Day.

This is maybe the most charismatic Denzel. Right from the get-go he’s blowing Ethan Hawke off the screen. At least for the first 30 minutes or so.

Helen: I remember being almost shocked by that film. I had gotten used to thinking of him as the sensible, reliable, authority figure.

Chris: Films like this and American Gangster tap into the darkness that’s there as well. Nick: American Gangster is his biggest box office hit. He hasn’t had a billion-dollar hit or a giant action franchise.

Chris: Until The Equalizer 2, he hadn’t made a sequel. If you look at The Bone Collector and Devil In A Blue Dress, the intent was that these would be franchise movies, but it never worked out.

Helen: There was an old, racist Hollywood myth that male Black leads don’t sell overseas. I feel like his career was used as evidence of this and was also somewhat shaped by this belief. Will Smith came along, and Black Panther came along, and proved that this was not the case. Chris: We haven’t talked about his impact as a Black leading man.

Amon: He really took the mantle from Poitier and has been That Guy for the Black film community for decades now. When Black Panther was coming out, Chadwick Boseman made a point of saying there would not be a Black Panther without Denzel Washington. There are so many Black actors today who have Denzel to thank for opening doors that would otherwise have remained closed to them. Nick: Going back to Devil In A Blue Dress, it’s a tragedy for me that there weren’t more of those. I love that film.

Chris: What are the other overlooked Denzel movies? Fallen is a dark, twisted, gnarly horror movie with a great performance.

Nick: I love a good Denzelwashington-versus-a-serialkiller movie, like The Bone Collector. They should do a box set of those.

Chris: Virtuosity, Ricochet, The Bone Collector, Fallen.

Nick: I would buy that in a heartbeat.

Amon: If we’re talking pure performances, then Flight would be in my top five. He’s phenomenal in that movie. The movie itself, I have issues with. And Man On Fire is almost a better version of the Equalizer movies.

Chris: I fully acknowledge that Man On Fire is a better film than The Equalizer. It’s probably better than both Equalizer movies put together.

Helen: Probably?

Chris: But The Equalizer 2 has one of the all-time great threats for me, when he tells the bad guys, in a very calm voice, “I’m going to kill each and every one of you. And the only disappointment in it for me is that I only get to do it once.”

Nick: I’m still furious that they didn’t call it ‘The Sequelizer’.

Chris: Right, enough squabbling. Let’s vote!