Few Hollywood actors are as consistently magnetic as Denzel Washington, the two-time Oscar-winning actor who has lit up movie screens for over four decades.
We asked nine movie buffs to share their favourite Washington film role.
Training Day (2001)
Denzel Washington has played many nasty dudes in his nearly 50 years as an actor. But the baddest of the badasses is his corrupt cop from “Training Day,” the 2001 Antoine Fuqua drama that won the actor his second Oscar. Washington’s Alonzo Harris makes Dirty Harry look like a wimp. Alonzo is a decorated L.A. narcotics officer, but on the streets he’s all gangster, shoving and sneering his way through the city’s criminal underworld. He twitches like an exposed vein as he barges into every scene with sinister intent, rattling criminals and cops alike — the latter including Ethan Hawke’s rookie LAPD officer Jake Hoyt, whom Alonzo is supposed to be mentoring. Washington’s performance fully justifies the “Training Day” trailer hype: “The only thing more dangerous than the line being crossed is the cop who has crossed it.” — Peter Howell, movie critic
Crimson Tide (1995)
It’s a scary thought to imagine that any one person is the only thing standing between us and the end of the world as we know it; the thesis of “Crimson Tide” is that there has to be a man with his finger on the button; it might as well be Denzel Washington. Tony Scott’s thriller unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a navy submarine with the task of potentially delivering a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union; the tension between Gene Hackman’s short-fused ship captain, who’s all too happy to shoot first and ask questions later, and Washington’s taciturn first officer, who’s more of a stickler for protocol, spills over in a series of exhilarating verbal skirmishes in which two great actors push themselves and each other to the limit. For all its big-budget trappings, “Crimson Tide” is essentially a movie of ideas, and about the necessity of ethical thinking and communication; Washington’s superlative performance suggests a mind furiously at work behind a steely exterior. At a crucial point in the drama, Washington’s character states the case for nuance in forceful terms: “no orders are right if they’re wrong.” It’s a great line and Washington delivers it with the penetrating authority of an edict being etched into stone tablets; thou shalt have no other movie stars before him. — Adam Nayman, movie critic
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
Denzel Washington is a grounding presence in this moody adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Older than the actors who typically play the man who would be king of Scotland, there’s a watchfulness and thoughtfulness to Washington’s performance that lends a realism to the deliberate unreality of Joel Coen’s highly stylized, black-and-white film. In a movie loaded with memorable acting turns (not least Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth), Washington is commanding in his progression from duty to murderous ambition, then to guilt, anger, fear, defiance and weary resignation. That the role brought him his seventh best actor Oscar nomination (out of a total 10 nominations and two wins) is no surprise. — Debra Yeo, Toronto Star
Malcolm X (1992)
“I’ll always be chasing you, Sidney — I’ll always be following in your footsteps,” said Denzel Washington to a beaming Sidney Poitier while accepting his best actor Oscar for “Training Day” in 2002. Both actors of uncommon presence and power, Poitier and Washington shared the challenge of navigating careers as Black superstars in a racist entertainment industry. Washington went on to have the kind of career that Poitier — burdened as the historic “first” — was never allowed, but when his stardom was coming into focus, it still accommodated a landmark performance as Malcolm X, the Black Nationalist leader popularly remembered as the yang to Martin Luther King’s assimilationist yin. It’s a role that veered wildly from the sort of “respectability politics” that Black actors like Washington (and Poitier) were supposed to embody, and its decades-long journey to the screen (including one ill-fated version scripted by James Baldwin) speaks to Hollywood’s wariness. But the risk paid off: Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic offers the fullest ever showcase for Washington’s talents. The thrilling pulpit scenes are memorable examples of his gift for going Big, but Lee’s epic, continent-hopping vision also allows the actor to embody Malcolm’s whole evolution: from small-time hood to fiery apostle to his break with the Nation of Islam, plus his lesser-known life as a family man. By Washington’s own admission, his career took a more commercial turn after this challenging role (“I was earning. I had responsibilities,” he recently told the Times of London); he earned that, and everything since, from what he put into “Malcolm X.” — Will Sloan, movie critic
Mississippi Masala (1991)
Denzel Washington should have made more romantic comedies. The proof of concept is all here in Mira Nair’s culture clash tale that follows the daughter of an Indian family forced to flee Idi Amin’s Uganda and make a new home at a family member’s motel in Greenwood, Mississippi. If I have one complaint it is that we don’t spend enough time with a devastatingly charming Washington and earnest, gorgeous Sarita Choudhury as they fall in love against the odds. But I’ll take the golden hour walks along the bayou, sultry landline phone call and fun-fair rides — to me, it’s better than “The Notebook.” — Alyshah Hasham, Toronto Star
Remember the Titans (2000)
“Remember the Titans” is many things: a classic sports film, an anti-racist parable, a ‘70s period drama packed with crowd-pleasing needle drops. But above all, it is the movie that introduced a generation of millennials to the undeniable charms of Denzel Washington.
Within the film’s universe, racism in America is solved in 1971, when a Black coach by the name of Herman Boone (played with beguiling vigour by Washington) was promoted to lead a football team at a newly integrated high school in Virginia. Boone did not ask for this gig — the school’s decision to make him head coach instead of Bill Yoast, a kindly and beloved white coach played by Will Patton, at first seems like an ill-advised decision to placate rising racial tensions among students. But like any great sports movie, those tensions slowly dissolve as players are forced to put their differences aside in the name of the greater good: that is, victory on the field. (By the end of the film, one of the more cartoonishly bigoted white students suffers a serious injury. When his Black teammate comes to visit him, the lapsed-racist experiences a moment of clarity: “I only saw what I was afraid of, now I know I was only hating my brother.”)
A Walt Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer co-production, “Remember the Titans” is not a subtle or particularly nuanced movie, but it is incredibly compelling, thanks in no small part to Washington’s Boone, who spends a large portion of the film berating his players like Sgt. Hartman in “Full Metal Jacket.” “This is no democracy,” he hollers during an early team meeting. “This is a dictatorship. I am the law.” As a coach he can seem brutal, but that tough exterior is tampered by a quiet, fatherly sense of protection and care, and a desire to protect these students from the brutal reality outside the school’s doors. That’s a tough needle to thread, but Washington pulls it off with ease. — Richie Assaly, Toronto Star
He Got Game (1998)
In “He Got Game,” Washington plays a man in a unique dilemma. In prison for accidentally killing his wife, he’s given temporary release to convince his son, a teenage basketball prospect played by real-life NBA star Ray Allen, to select as his college the governor’s alma mater, all with the promise of a shorter prison sentence. Always ready to deliver the best for director Spike Lee, Washington brings a spark to his role as Jake Shuttleworth unlike any he’s ever had. He must at once reckon with his terrible actions while reconnecting with the son he left motherless. Every twinge of regret and yearning is visible on Washington’s face at all times, always at the surface, making for perhaps the actor’s most plainly human, most alive and most compelling performance in a career with almost too many to count. — Corey Atad, movie critic
Virtuosity (1995)
One measure of a great actor’s greatness is how high they can elevate schlock. And Denzel Washington always brought the hydraulics. Take this routine sci-fi action flick, one of the earliest to tackle virtual reality. As a disgraced cop hunting a serial-killing avatar that’s let loose in the real world, Washington is appropriately stoic and determined, and never lets on that the material is beneath him. Russell Crowe, as his nemesis, also brings his A game to what is essentially a very expensive B movie. — Doug Brod, Toronto Star
John Q. (2002)
I doubt “John Q.” ranks as the best performance for anyone involved in it, but it’s a movie I still vividly remember watching for the first time aged about 13, and its one of those absurdly heavy-handed Hollywood movies so determined to make a good point that nothing in it really worked.
In the film, Washington plays a blue collar worker whose son collapses while playing baseball and is rushed to the hospital — where, it turns out, he needs an expensive heart transplant his insurance company won’t cover. So our eponymous Mr. Q takes a bunch of the hospital staff hostage and they bond over their mutual dislike of America’s for-profit health-care system. It’s a completely absurd movie, whose star-studded cast (it also features Ray Liotta and Robert Duvall for God’s sake) can’t compensate for its total lack of subtlety. But as always, Washington is fun to watch and very memorable.
There’s one scene, for example, where he begs a doctor (played by James Woods) at gunpoint to rip out his heart so that his son can live. Watching it again, I’d forgotten just how ridiculous it really is — yet Washington plays it completely straight and improbably gives it some actual dramatic flair. He has a zillion better roles than this, but it takes a special kind of talent to be as good as he is in something so bad. — Luke Savage, writer
