
Washington wears his characters’ weariness well here, giving you the sense that this is a seriously broken man with his share of personal demons and unfinished business even when writer-director John Lee Hancock’s potboiler gets stuck in simmer mode, you can feel the star adding his own little éminece grise touches, especially once Jared Leto’s scenery-chewing suspect enters the picture. Naturally, he decides to help a younger investigator (Rami Malek) track down whoever’s stalking and stabbing young women. When he’s asked to fetch evidence in his old stomping ground for a case, Deacon stumbles across a murder that may be tied to the One Who Got Away.
DEJA VU MOVIE CONSPIRACY SERIAL
Once upon a time, however, he was a crack homicide detective in the big city until a case involving a serial killer derailed him. And Washington’s latest thriller could not be pulpier: He’s Joe “Deke” Deacon, a deputy sheriff working a small-town beat north of Los Angeles. those grittier, grimier, more genre-centric films where he’s chasing down a suspect and seems precariously on the edge of losing it at all times. Of course we love those Denzel Prestige movies - your Glorys, your Fences, your Philadelphias - but we’ll cop to a serious weakness for Denzel Pulp, i.e.

DEJA VU MOVIE CONSPIRACY HOW TO
(Even his attempt to teach young Ashton Sanders a lesson via screaming in his face and a loaded gun feels way too familiar.) Still, the man knows how to sell this AARP-age action stuff beautifully: Put up with the abundance of dead air, and you get to hear Washington turn a line like “I’m going to kill each and every one of you, and the only disappointment in it for me is: I only get to do it once” into tough-guy poetry. As with so many franchise second chapters, the law of diminishing returns kicks in quicker than you’d like, and Washington could do this cool, calm badass act in his sleep. While he’s driving a Lyft in Boston, an old colleague from his Defense Intelligence Agency gets into killed in Belgium - cue McCall punching lots of faces, slitting lots of throats and unleashing a lot of hell on those who’ve wronged him.

DEJA VU MOVIE CONSPIRACY UPDATE
DFīecause you can’t keep a good action hero down, Washington returns as Robert McCall, the world’s deadliest Good Samaritan, in Antoine Fuqua’s sequel to his 2014 update on the old Edward Woodard TV series. And as Denzel reminds you, there are thousands out there just like him. Still, Washington fills in a lot of the blanks, showing you why attention must be paid to this eccentric whose “lack of success is self-imposed.” Roman came, he saw his ideology curdle, he lost. Writer-director Tony Gilroy’s story, much less his conception of this legal savant with a talent for alienating allies, is muddled, to say the least. It will also eventually lead to his undoing. Caught between Collin Farrell’s corporate-firm devil and Carmen Ejogo’s young, activist angel, he finally tires of “doing the impossible for the ungrateful” and makes a decision that offers a short-term sense of meaning. A crusader who’s seen his righteous progressiveness fall out of fashion as much as his funky, ill-fitting maroon suits, Roman is a man out of time. Washington, to his credit, leans into the jagged bits of this flawed man with gusto if anything, the star works double-time to make it twice as challenging to root for this sad-sack hero. Most actors would get handed a part like Roman Israel - a small-time, middle-aged lawyer whose worst enemies are a mercenary judicial system, an uncaring society and himself (not in that order) - and try to sand off the rough edges.

(All blurbs written by Bilge Ebiri unless otherwise noted.) Here are all of Denzel Washington’s performances, from worst to best, the WTF to the downright brilliant. That doesn’t mean we’re not gonna rank them, however! Watching and re-watching Denzel’s films - 48 of them, since 1981, and all of them big parts - you’re seized with a newfound respect for the man’s craft, talent, and passion in his performances. He’s become perhaps one of the more reliably bankable movie star in Hollywood’s firmament, despite the fact that he generally avoids sequels and superhero movies. Washington is the rare talent who can transcend - and usually improve - his material.

Ever since Denzel Washington’s theatrical debut in the early 1980s, the actor has given some of the most incredible performances of our time across more than three decades: Who can deny his compelling work in films like Cry Freedom, The Mighty Quinn or Mo’ Better Blues? Or such Nineties classics as Malcolm X, Mississippi Masala or Crimson Tide? Or his brilliant later turns in movies like Inside Man, Fences and Flight?
