The Millennium in Frames: In Training Day, Denzel Washington Started Saving Bad Movies

At this point, if you’re not taking it to the bank that Denzel is one of the great actors of our lifetimes, you either live under a rock or you don’t care about black people. Denzel has so much charisma, magnetism, and force around him that he’s carved out his own sort of genre, the “Denzel movie.” Safehouse isn’t really an action flick. It’s a Denzel movie. Flight isn’t really a drama. It’s a Denzel movie. Man on Fire isn’t a really a thriller. It’s a Denzel movie. That dynamic is supremely rare. We often ask, “How do these movies get made?” Sometimes, the answer is, “Because Denzel was in it.” There aren’t many other actors who have that draw.

Denzel Washington is singular and undeniable. We can all see that, but sometimes, Denzel’s presence is so overwhelming we often don’t notice the bare bones of the movie right behind him. Once we do notice those bones, a troubling realization comes to bear: Denzel has been in a lot of really junky movies. He used to not be, but he is now, and the line of demarcation—clearly, obviously, tragically—is the movie for which he earned the Oscar for Best Actor in 2001: Training Day.

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In a word, Training Day is badass. It has a universal-awesome feeling where you feel if anyone in the world walked in on you watching it, they’d approve. It’s loud and showy and dares you to hate it because it knows you never will. You can jump in at any time because the next scene is always a great one, and it has a stickiness that makes even its tiny moments—remember Ethan Hawke unloading his pistol at the kitchen table?—memorable. Training Day is the definition of a cool movie, and it earns that label entirely on the merit of its leading man: Denzel “I Just Dunked On Your Favorite Actor’s Head” Washington.

Some say Denzel’s win for Training Day was concessional. It wasn’t. The guy doesn’t just carry Training Day; he kidnaps it and holds it hostage for every last penny. His character, crooked cop Alonzo Harris, is one of the all-time great antagonists, and if you want to take away his Oscar because Sean Penn made your wuss-ass cry in I Am Sam, best of luck to you.

We say a lot of things are perfect nowadays, so this isn’t going to mean as much as it should, but Denzel Washington is perfect in Training Day. He’s the smartest, scariest, funniest guy onscreen in every single moment of the movie. You watch every other actor in terms of how they’re playing off Denzel, which makes sense, because not only is it impossible to stop thinking about Denzel as you watch Training Day, but it feels like Ethan Hawke and all the other actors can’t stop thinking about him, either. Hawke has said that being on the set of Training Day with Denzel was like watching a hurricane approach. You had to constantly be on alert, studying his patterns, in order to deliver the best reaction you could. It brings us back to that first point all the way at the top of the page: Training Day isn’t really a crime movie or a cop movie. It’s a Denzel movie.

If you take away Denzel, is Training Day any good? It’s maybe okay. Make no mistake, there are other good things about the movie—especially Ethan Hawke, who’s as fantastic a foil to Denzel as you can ask for—but without Washington this is an average flick at best. Rookie cop joins the force to discover some corruption among his superiors—how many times have we seen that? The story beats are pretty expected and the set pieces (the raid on the drug den, the final shootout, Denzel’s demise) are decent, but nothing to cherish on their own merits. The ending especially, when the Russians finally catch up to Alonzo, is pretty standard for a cop flick like this. It only feels like a letdown—at the time, it really was maligned by critics—because you feel Denzel deserved to go out with more prestige. It makes you wonder if the people behind the movie really knew what they had when they picked Washington for the part. If they did, maybe his exit wouldn’t have felt so short-shrift. They could’ve given it some glory.

All this is to say there’s a case to be made that Denzel in Training Day is a lot like LeBron James on the 2007 Cavaliers. The Cavs made the NBA Finals that year because James dragged an average at-best supporting roster all by himself. The 2007 Cavs were not a good team, they just had one all-time player that managed to put them in a position typically occupied by good teams. Training Day, if we’re honest about it, might be similar. Denzel is transcendent in it, and his presence alone makes the movie worth watching start-to-finish, but take all the pieces in tandem and it’s worth discussing whether this really has cultural weight outside the “great Denzel flick” side of things. In other words, Training Day might be average at its core.

Since Training Day, the pattern seems to persist for Denzel. There are outliers—Inside Man, Manchurian Candidate, Flight—but otherwise it’s a resume that barely rises above “fine” in terms of raw movie quality. American Gangster, Man on Fire, Safehouse, The Equalizer—they’re all great Denzel vehicles, but they’re not good flicks. Fences, which might prove to be a focus shift for our guy, is a little better, but Denzel is more “serious actor” good in it instead of “hands up this is a robbery” good in it. There’s a notable difference.

Training Day is probably among the millennium’s 10 best performances by one of the era’s three best performers, but it comes with the feeling of a missed opportunity, both for the movie in front of us and the career that played out in its wake. When all is said and done, despite a 90s slate stacked with flicks like Glory, Philadelphia, and Malcolm X, Denzel Washington’s 2000s run might be the most disappointing body of work in Hollywood. The second half of his prime was blown on money-makers and flicks that were, ironically, all about him. Perhaps in his post-Fences stretch, Denzel can shift his career path and lock into good movies again. The paradox is, it might mean he has to take a step back.