Washington is the rare talent who can transcend — and usually improve — his material. What an impressive body of work. All blurbs written by Bilge Ebiri unless otherwise noted. Crowe smirks. Washington glowers. This dreadfully shrill buddy comedy has Bob Hoskins as a racist sleazebag cop who gets a heart transplant from a black lawyer whom he tried to arrest. This serial-killer thriller is indeed silly — and it certainly has its moments. An atmospheric possession thriller that gets increasingly dopey by the minute.
Is there a demon making its way through the city and the police force? Has it been here all along?!? As a blind warrior-wanderer making his way through a post-apocalyptic landscape, Washington manages to do the impossible: He somehow becomes as humorless as the rest of this turgid action epic.
The actor puts his natural sense of leadership to good use as a renegade calling the shots for ragged band of gunslingers: His quiet, calculating intensity is ideal for a Western hero. The movie itself is a chaotic mess, however, and Fuqua is a better director of character scenes than he is of action spectacle. Denzel should remind him of this the next time they work together. This controversial thriller came under fire when it was released for its depiction of Islamic extremists conducting terrorist attacks in New York.
As the FBI agent trying both to track down the terrorists and to undermine he creeping fascism of a surveillance state, Washington makes for a solid hero — a compassionate professional, heroic yet conscientious. Washington also directed this inspirational period drama about a debate team at all-black Wiley College in Texas during the Depression, and his sincerity shines through in both his direction and his performance.
The film is kind of all over the place — tackling segregation, debate tactics, romance, labor relations, and family conflict all at once, and often in fairly facile fashion. He has some unusually moving moments here; a fully rounded character, however, rarely emerges. Washington plays the corrupt public relations honcho in cahoots with Middle Eastern oil sheiks who are trying to get Gere to help elect their chosen candidate.
