In Praise of Denzel Washington, Super Villain

You will know the most gleeful, instantly gratifying, oh-this-is-going-to-be-good moment in Gladiator II when you see it. The dopamine peak of Ridley Scott‘s long-awaited sequel to his 2000 Oscar-winning epic isn’t the opening battle scene, in which Paul Mescal and his neighbors unleash hell on Roman centurions attacking them. It isn’t when Mescal is forced to fight a rabid baboon for sport, and the Irish heartthrob wins by savagely biting the monkey’s arm. It’s not when a charging rhino gores an unlucky gladiator, or when a massive naval battle is recreated within a flooded Colosseum, complete with a half-dozen hungry sharks. Nor is it when Mescal finally faces off against Pedro Pescal’s military general in an extremely Freudian grudge match, i.e. the mano a mano showdown the movie has been leading up to for close to two hours.

Rather, the standout scene in this massive, ultraviolent swords-and-sandals spectacle is one of its simplest: A man walks into his place of business. To be fair, that man is played by Denzel Washington. And said place of business is a pit in which prisoners of war must prove themselves fit to become gladiators who will entertain ancient Rome’s patricians. But that last detail is almost superfluous to what makes the sequence so exciting. And it’s not just who is entering the frame, but how he’s doing it. “Saunters” is too timid a word to describe the manner in which Washington, clad in ornate robes with his arms swinging and a bounce in his step, approaches his personal throne, ready to see who’s worthy of his attention. Ideally, the big rush of this set piece would be seeing the handsome young star of this blockbuster sink his teeth into a crazed simian. But what really spikes the adrenaline is how, having keenly watched this prospect conduct himself in the most barbaric manner imaginable, Washington spins three words: “I’ll buy him.”

Even if you haven’t seen Gladiator II yet, you’ve probably heard that Washington shoplifts the movie the minute he struts into the picture and keeps it snugly tucked away in his caftan pocket for the remainder of the running time. His character, a former slave turned power broker named Macrinus, strikes a Faustian bargain with Mescal’s Lucius Verus Aurelius: Fight for me, and you’ll get not only a path to freedom but a chance to avenge the death of your wife. The moody brute is more than just a gladiator to Macrinus, however. He is a ticket into the inner circle that rules Rome. So much of Scott’s sequel hews to the path of comfortable familiarity, either playing off of or directly referencing the original movie: We can predict most of the moves Mescal will make, how the warring factions outside of the arena will react, the decadent manner in which the twin emperors conduct themselves. But Macrinus is a wild card. You truly have no idea what he’ll do next, and that’s before he does a double act with a decapitated head.

It’s a role destined for a Greatest-Denzel-Hits reel in a career already brimming with incredible work, and the perfect example of why Bad Denzel may, in fact, be the best Denzel. The Oscar winner never invests less than 100 percent, even if the movie doesn’t deserve what he’s bringing to the party, but with villainous turns, he’s giving a little extra. He’s played doctors, lawyers, Civil Rights icons (American and African), cops, soldiers, cowboys, pilots, teachers, coaches, princes, kings, and everyday people just trying to get by. Most of them have at least one foot solidly planted on the side of good; even his Macbeth starts out as a loyal subject of the realm before his moral compass cracks in two. But if his Macrinus could ever be described as “good,” that version has long left the building by the time we meet him. And it’s the way that Washington plays his character’s cunning, his calculated chess moves, and his ability to use chaos to his advantage — not to mention the gestures and giggles that the actor pitches at the level of high camp — that makes him so thrilling to watch.

You can catch glimpses of Bad Denzel lurking right beneath the surface of a lot of his performances over the past 40-plus years, especially in roles that lean more toward flawed, borderline antihero than straight-down-the-middle hero (Mo’ Better Blues, He Got Game, Flight, The Tragedy of Macbeth). But when he lets his characters go off the leash and indulge in their worst behavior, you can feel Washington tapping into a collective id that in a way that feels downright giddy. His Gladiator II character is the Roman empire edition of a streetwise shot caller, one who knows how to flatter senators, how to disarm potential enemies and marks with boisterousness (dig the way he shouts “More wine!” before prying loose intel from a drinking companion), how to turn that famous smile into a shark’s grin. You can feel Washington pulling inspiration from all sorts of likely places, though if you were looking for precedents for his Machiavellian strategist, go back to two specific Bad Denzel roles.

The first is, unsurprisingly, Training Day (2001) — the ultimate Denzel-breaking-bad showcase, the 21st century pinnacle of a matinee-idol movie star giving a charismatic heel turn. You know Detective Alonzo Harris is no good from the second Ethan Hawke‘s rookie Jake Hoyt enters his orbit, and that the LAPD’s foulest is about to give his ward an unsentimental education in how to run the streets. The sheer joy with which Harris exercises his dominance over everybody he encounters, from unlucky college students to gang-member informants to his supposed superiors “the Three Wise Men,” exerts a moth-to-flame pull on you; Hoyt is the tour guide that lets you ride shotgun with this apex predator, but it’s Harris who you find yourself rooting for. Not for nothing did Washington win his second Academy Award (and first Best Actor Oscar) for playing this magnetic, thoroughly corrupt cop. Every time his Gladiator II character extravagantly taps his fingers together, or waggles his tongue after an innuendo, or raises his volume from a shout to a “King Kong ain’t got shit on me!” roar, you can practically hear Alonzo Harris standing just outside the frame, slow-clapping for this Eternal City alpha.

The second is Frank Lucas, the main character of Washington’s other collaboration with Sir Ridley Scott, American Gangster (2007). Part biopic, part police procedural, and part Mob thriller, it chronicles the rise of Lucas from Harlem drug lord Bumpy Johnson’s right-hand man to the king of New York’s heroin trade in the 1970s. Lucas retains his hold on the lucrative smack market largely because of his ability to not attract attention; his eventual downfall is hastened by the regrettable decision to stand out in a crowd for once and rock a chinchilla fur coat and matching hat at a prizefight. (Lucas would never be caught dead in one of Macrinus’ flowing, patterned robes and WWF-sized gold belts.) But his real superpower is the way he’s able to observe everything from every angle on the sidelines and then coolly make his move. He’s a human cobra, patient, stealthy, and willing to play folks against each other and pick up the spoils in the aftermath — a quality that Gladiator II‘s manipulator extraordinaire also has in abundance. Both prefer to operate from the shadows until a display of power is necessary. You could argue that Lucas isn’t a complete villain; he does buy his mom a mansion. But given the way he calmly interrupts a family meal in a restaurant, shoots a rival in the streets, then returns to resume his lecture in between bites, you would not call him a hero, either.

One of the best Bad Denzel moments in Scott’s epic crime-and-punishment story comes near the end, after Lucas has been caught and is interrogated by his own personal Javert, Detective Richie Roberts — the fact he’s played by none other than the star of the original Gladiator, Russell Crowe, simply makes the scene that much sweeter now. The two men square off with verbal arguments regarding the acre’s worth of gray area between right and wrong, and while Crowe’s character has righteousness on his side, Washington’s gangster has both the gift of gab and a knack for knocking such simplistic notions into the dirt. He’s just someone who saw an opportunity and took it. He can’t help it if he was smarter and savvier than the competition. Oh, and don’t talk to him about “normal.” When you’ve lived the life he’s lived, that adjective means next to nothing. It’s a jungle out there.

There’s a seductiveness to Washington’s voice, until he decides to get dead serious. He’ll swipe a full coffee cup off a table to punctuate a point. But for a few moments there, you find yourself drawn to Lucas’ idea that he’s nothing more than a successful businessman, and this is all just business as usual. The glint in the eye of his Training Day cop is soon replaced by a chilliness in the window to his American Gangster entrepreneur’s soul, but it’s still there. And it’s the memory of both of these super-charming villains that spring to mind when Macrinus struts onto the scene in Gladiator II. Washington is building off what he’s done in those two previous strolls on the dark side, before slipping into a toga and taking off in to the love-to-hate-them stratosphere. You hope that the awards-giving powers that be recognize what he’s doing here. But at the very least, you find yourself watching the actor tear into this juicy Bad Denzel role and declaring, with no shortage of admiration, “Myyyy man!”