The marketing for The Equalizer is really driving home the fact that it’s the star and director of Training Day, together again, 13 years later. Yes, Denzel Washington won a Best Actor award for the film, but it’s not exactly grown in stature into some big cinematic achievement. The film is fine, a bit overblown, but it sure is fun to watch Washington — ever the stoic actor — blow his top.
Having said that, while putting together a list of 13 essential Denzel Washington films, Training Day definitely marks a shift in the actor’s career. Even just in images. Prior to Training Day most of the image searches for films we were considering generally have a gun pointed at him, whip slashes across his body or we see him standing up to authority with no weapons present, using his words. Training Day onward is different. Same image test, but the guns are in Washington’s hand. Washington has been not just the aggressor, but the enforcer, the agitator. The actor no longer is reacting to injustices, he’s now wreaking havoc. And he has the charisma to be rootable — even when he’s exploding assholes in Man on Fire.
Related: ‘Man on Fire’ — Ten Years Later
Despite our desire to see the actor mix it up a bit more recently (like he did in Flight) there is something great about Washington’s current run of revenge flicks. He doesn’t have to be the moral messenger anymore. He killed the messenger. Now, Washington can just be a movie star. And what a star! Seriously, if you don’t know what’s so appealing about Denzel Washington, check out his interview with CraveOnline’s William Bibbiani.
Then sound off: let us know what we got wrong on our list of Washington essentials (we know, no one ever tells you when you get it right). We tried our best to highlight different types of performances and films. So if you’re only into the Washington-Tony Scott collaborative persona, we’ve got a few flicks you should see before Denzel opens up another can of whoop-ass (aisle 6) in The Equalizer.
Slideshow: The Essential Denzel Washington: 13 Must See Movies
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
The Essential Denzel Washington: 13 Must-See Movies
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Glory (1989)
After breaking through on the TV-series "St. Elsewhere", Denzel chose carefully and took supporting turns in films directed by Norman Jewison, Sidney Lumet and Sir Richard Attenborough. But it'd be a fellow TV-to-cinema jumper -- director Ed Zwick (creator of "thirtysomething") -- that'd catapult Washington into super-stardom.
Washington played Private Trip, a runaway volunteer in Robert Gould Shaw's northern Civil War troop. Trip and Major Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) have such intense verbal spats about house slaves, white soldiers and running for the presidency, that you almost forget that the story is framed around their white leader, Shaw (Matthew Broderick). Shaw has Trip whipped in front of the other men and Trip stares him down disdainfully, never breaking eye contact. Washington wins a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and he moves on to leading roles.
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Mississippi Masala (1991)
One of the most underrated films on this list is Mira Nair's portrait of global disenfranchisement. Meena (Sarita Choudhury) romances Demetrius (Washington), a hotel carpet cleaner in rural Mississippi. Her family objects. They're only in Mississippi because, under British rule, many Indians were sent to Uganda to help build railroads. After Uganda expelled the British they allowed Indians to stay. But after Indians started making enough money to buy property in Uganda the wartime general made all the Indians leave, in order to promote a unified black Uganda.
Even though he's experienced racism, this is a different type of racism that Washington's character encounters. And one that his character actually knows how to confront: they're all in Mississippi because they were forced from somewhere else. And although Nair's film strays a little too much from Demetrius and Meena's courtship, it's only because she finds this example of diaspora in the rural American south to be fascinating. And it is.
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Malcolm X (1992)
A monolithic performance highlights Spike Lee's titanic-sized film. At 202-minutes long Malcolm X is one of the longest American mass-produced films. And Washington makes every minute count.
Malcolm X, the man, is a polarizing figure and has been largely ignored in American history because a less volatile freedom-seeker, Dr. Martin Luther King, gets all the textbook love. Lee had already made a film that ended with quotes from both King and X, Do the Right Thing, to show that both of their teachings are valid and that some mixture of their ideas is what's best for modern black America. But by and large, X was too angry and too militant for a full historical embrace in conservative America. But Washington and Lee show us the man's roots, his tortures, his mistakes, and most importantly, his spiritualism. And Washington is able to play that spiritual through-line like notes in the jazz music that X loves to visit in the clubs of Harlem: ferocious but collected. And working toward a calamity.
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Crimson Tide (1995)
In retrospect, it's kind of ridiculous that this is the only Washington-starring film that made our list of 100 'Guy Movies' Every Guy Should See. But it makes sense that at least this one is there: Tony Scott's film is two guys shouting at each other in a submarine. One (Gene Hackman) wants war, the other (Washington) wants more information and tries his damnedest to keep his superior from flipping the switch. It's rousing at the time, but perhaps a little more interesting in retrospect as it is the highlight of a period of films where Washington is a pacifist. And he stands firm.
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Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Director Carl Franklin and Washington had the rights to three Walter Mosley Los Angeles noir books focusing on Easy Rawlins. Devil in the Blue Dress was the only one that they got to make. Which is a shame, because with Washington's charisma (at the time, Devil followed five incredibly stoic Washington performances, so it was nice to see him humble, capable and just trying to do an honest day's work) and Mosley's different shade of noir, Rawlins really should've been a Philip Marlowe of the 1990s.
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The Preacher's Wife (1996)
The Preacher's Wife is not a good movie. But Whitney Houston sings and Denzel Washington falls in love without ever showing hints of lust. Because he is from heaven. Why is this film on our list? Because it's great to remind yourself how warm and likable this guy is. And how pearly of a smile he has. Especially after seeing him take on all the continents of mobsters in the past decade with nary a grin.
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He Got Game (1998)
Training Day is touted as the film that took Washington to the dark side, but we think he started in this Spike Lee (reunion) joint. As an absentee father who is temporarily released from prison by the warden (Ned Beatty) to convince his highly touted high school son, Jesus Shuttleworth (2x NBA champ Ray Allen), to play for the warden's alma mater. In exchange he'll get a reduced sentence. If that prospect sounds ludicrous, you haven't closely followed college athletics and how quickly the public will turn on teenagers for choosing other schools, or missing field goals.
Lee's film is an urban horror film: horrible fathers, the governmental pyramid of mega-money exchanging hands above the unpaid employees (nee students) who are trying to enter a workforce with an extremely low success rate. Not to mention the other power pyramid that makes it difficult enough for less powerful ethnic and social groups to work their way up and leads to increased imprisonment and sport dreams of escape.
He Got Game is a hard, sobering watch. It's made harder by how ugly Washington's character is. He visits a prostitute (Milla Jovovich) before his own son. King Kong ain't got shit on that.
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Training Day (2001)
Which brings us to Training Day. People love a great villain and Alonzo Harris (Washington) is a giant gorilla of a villain. Overall, the film is a tad murky but it is great fun seeing one of Hollywood's all time great nice guys unhinge as a corrupt cop who's in on the crime he busts.
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The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Washington's reunion with his Philadelphia director, Jonathan Demme, is a great bookend to his work in Courage Under Fire. In Courage, Washington played an army officer wracked with guilt over, in confusion, killing a tank of his own men in the first Operation Desert Storm.
When Manchurian Candidate was released the U.S. was already in a second Iraq War (this time dubbed Operation Freedom), started by the son of the president who started the last one. The war familial sequel. Candidate is a remake. But it was very timely and done with great respect for the original. Perhaps the only way to critique a government's obsession with war is to remake a film from the 60s ... about government's obsession with war.
In Courage he investigates if a woman in combat (Meg Ryan) is worthy of a Medal of Honor. Here he investigates if a war hero (Liev Schreiber) is worthy of being president. He discovers brainwashing. All three films (Courage, original Candidate, this remake) have the gall to take on blind American war flag-waving.
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Inside Man (2006)
The most commercial of Spike Lee's joints (a bank robbery) has post-9/11-isms (accepted racial profiling) and Wall Street on the brain. Jodie Foster is named White and she has only the bank's interests in mind. Christopher Plummer is The Man and he's an old white dude. Willem Dafoe is a racist cop. And Washington tries to cool everyone down before trying to figure out who the bank robber is in a sea of similarly outfitted people of multiple races. We know it's Clive Owen, but what are Washington's prejudices?
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Deja Vu (2006)
CraveOnline has been a vocal supporter of this underrated Tony Scott-Denzel Washington collaboration. Looking for Man on Fire, Taking of the Pelham 1 2 3, Unstoppable? We name this the best of the 21st century Scott (Tony)-Denzel collaborations.
The shutter-shock opening credits and final shot (Washington protecting a blonde Fanning) might give you deja vu, but Tony Scott's spastic geographical zooms actually all make sense in this potboiler. Because there are security camera wormholes! Washington goes back four days to try to stop the murder of a beautiful woman (Paula Patton) and he falls in love with her. Shades of Vertigo, shades of 12 Monkeys, Deja Vu benefits from the fact that Washington is a leading man who is as likable as James Stewart. And far more than Bruce Willis.
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American Gangster (2007)
Ridley Scott's film is a shadow of the 1970s American crime films that it emulates. But don't tell that to Denzel, who gives a mesmerizing performance in a period setting that, frankly, we'd never seen. The most prominent African American actor plays the kingpin.
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Flight (2012)
An old-fashioned, one man, two and a half hour acting exercise. From this backseat driver's seat, it'd appeared that Washington had been coasting for a few years. But as a drunk pilot who miraculously landed a faulty plane and then suffered the fallout of revealing that he was drunk, Washington is amazing. Washington, under oath, says, "I'm drunk right now" with an eye flutter, a fist on the table. a shameful downturn of the lips and flap of the cheeks. And it's crushing. The story itself sputters a little bit by trying to force a second character (Kelly Reilly is good, just not necessary for how much of the story she gets), but Washington's Whip Whitaker is entirely deserving of all the runway he gets.
