The Best Denzel Washington Movie You (Probably) Haven't Seen

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My favorite Denzel Washington movie isn’t Training Day, even though I can probably recite all 122 pages of that script off top. And it’s not any of the other usual suspects, like one of his numerous links with Spike Lee or the late, great Tony Scott. The most entertaining Denzel Washington movie, to me—the one I can run back ad infinitum, that holds a special place in my heart despite not being his objective, critical-consensus “best”? That would be Out of Time, a breezy neo-noir from 2003 that is oft-overlooked but by no means insignificant.

Right now across the nation and beyond, theatergoers are being treated to another in a long line of 50-point Denzel games, as he, respectfully, validates the “wash” in Washington amidst a very talented ensemble in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II and reaffirms that when it comes to the Best Actor Alive convo, it’s just Big Him. It got me thinking back to Out of Time, which I’ve only just realized was probably my first Denzel big-screen experience—13 years old at the Clearview Cinemas in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. Few others probably remember it as clearly, and who can blame them—it’s a B-movie thriller that came not long after his Academy Award Best Actor win for Training Day and just before Man on Fire. But on the lowest of keys, it hits just as hard as those and all of his other top-10 mainstays.

This isn’t an endorsement fueled solely on nostalgia—subtracting channel-surf landings on TNT and HBO mainstays like Training Day or The Bone Collector, Out of Time is probably the Denzel Washington film I’ve revisited with intention the most. There are big Denzel performances in big movies, and outsized Denzel showings in smaller films. Out of Time is neither. Directed by Carl Franklin—who had previously directed Denzel in Devil In a Blue Dress, another Obvious Denzel Classic—it’s the kind of mid-budget, sexy B-movie thriller that died out of multiplexes in the 2010s. Today it would be an Apple TV+ series that grinds the plot to dust with two episodes still left to go; as is, the film barely cracks 100 minutes and the result is a taut thriller that basically just keeps shuttling Denzel from frying pan to fire and back again, with stakes just high enough to keep you invested but never too serious to wring the fun out of it all. You’ll probably never see a scene from this in an honorific awards-show reel, but it’s the only Denzel Washington movie where he leverages his movie-star charisma to keep the audience on pins and needles over an incoming fax, so maybe you should?

Good or evil, the many charming badasses in Denzel’s pantheon usually have their shit together—or at least they’ve perfected the art of appearing to have their shit together. Out of Time is delicious for being the rare role that makes him smaller. He plays police Chief Matt Whitlock, a cargo pants-and-Monarchs-wearing big fish in a South Florida pond so small that size barely matters. He’s cool, sure, but cool is a base setting all Denzel characters inherently start at, because Denzel. And that patented ease and assuredness only lasts about 30 minutes before Matt gets plunged into a noir conspiracy of airport-paperback proportions, and then the fun really begins: we get to see Denzel squirm.

Chances are this one either slipped by or you barely remember it, so I’ll be vague about the plot. Denzel’s Chief Whitlock, estranged from his big-city detective wife (Eva Mendes), has rekindled an old high school romance with Ann (Sanaa Lathan), in spite of her abusive husband, Chris (pre-problematic Dean Cain, used to great effect as a scumbag here). Matt’s also coming off of a career drug bust, the six-figure fruits of which are still under lock and key in his one-horse-town police station. A sudden turn of events inspires Matt to do something foolish but noble with that money—and then as the dead bodies start piling up, we realize that was only the tip of Matt’s stupid iceberg, as it coalesces into a case that his soon-to-be ex-wife gets assigned to investigate where all the evidence points to him.

It is totally a greatest hits of all the standard noir cliches, down to the dopey comic-relief sidekick. But convention and plot barely matter when Denzel keeps every scene crackling with whatever that moment calls for, be it steam (he and Sanaa threaten to push the movie past its PG-13 rating), smoldering heat (of course he’s still in love with Eva Mendes), tension (there’s a great scene early on where he and Cain “pretend” to say everything they’re dying to air out for real), or anxiety, which is pretty much the gear the movie stays in once the plot really kicks in.

Simply put, you’ve never quite seen Denzel under pressure like this, and it’s a thrill to watch. He’s a simp, then a sucker, then a scrambler, hustling to catch up from being a few steps behind, desperately keeping his wife from realizing he’s her man sometimes with seconds to spare. It never gets dark enough to be the kind of movie where you wonder if the hero might not prevail, but boy does he earn it. Every sequence is a new corner he has to paint himself out of, a new routine of a cat-and-mouse he has to dance with Mendes, and it would probably ultimately be too ridiculous in a lesser actor’s hands. In Denzel’s, the net result is Movie Star Magic, the type of breezy adult thriller that matinees and movie dates were made for.

That it came in the wake of his big Academy Award win for Training Day makes it hit even harder. It’s possible this was filmed or at least in motion before he got the statue, but in context it feels like a nice reset. Oftentimes an Oscar win sends a person in pursuit of more awards bait, or big blockbuster paychecks. That Denzel instead chose to re-team with Franklin, one of the genre’s most underrated craftsmen, for something in the middle that’s held together entirely by his gravitas, and exercises a different set of muscles, is kind of awesome.

Equally dope is that it casually centers Black lead characters in a genre that often doesn’t, at least rarely in a way where Blackness isn’t a factor of the plot. Nothing against those, but sometimes the best form of representation is just seeing us in spaces where it doesn’t feel like our existence has to be validated. Nothing about the story dictates the casting of Denzel Washington and Sanaa Lathan beyond their being beautiful, talented actors with enough sparks between them to set off a gas explosion and incite a few murders. (And the one moment Matt’s race does come up, it’s in a darkly funny stereotyping gag that he deftly leans into to cast suspicion away from himself.)

There are bigger and technically better Denzel movies, sure, but Out of Time is more than just a footnote in a storied filmography. Go-big-or-go-home performances like Gladiator II are great, but sometimes the deceptively simple performance is just as genius—and even more fun. Denzel recently set the timeline into a flurry listing off the litany of upcoming projects he has in the chamber before he wants to retire in an interview that simultaneously hinted at the air of an artist acknowledging his mortality while showing that he has so much more to give. I’d love to see him make the Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson films he’s hinted at, but here’s hoping he finds space on that to-do list to give Franklin a call. They’re two for two.