Few major movie stars are more consistent than Denzel Washington. Just as Will Smith usually plays the wisecracking charmer and Adam Sandler can be counted on to imitate his real-life wealth while wearing shorts, Washington has developed a repertoire of various cops, agents, and occasionally train operators. Sometimes he delivers a great performance as none of the above, like his work in Spike Lee's He Got Game, but for the better part of the last fifteen or twenty years, he's been doing mid-level thrillers, often with talented genre journeymen like Tony Scott or Carl Franklin.
He's maintained, perhaps even increased, his predilection for genre pulp since his Oscar win for Training Day, but Washington's showboating bad-guy performance in that movie also allowed some moral murkiness to set upon some of his subsequent characters. Maybe this, along with his inability to sleepwalk through rote parts, is why Washington's niche doesn't wear out as quickly as his movie-star peers'. Some stars become so accustomed to their established personae that they can only re-energize in roles that push against that familiarity and likability. Washington, on the other hand, has the old-fashioned star quality of always seeming alert and crafty, no matter the material. Even in a second-tier movie like Safe House, he burrows into his character and infuses the movie with charisma and confidence.
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