Denzel Washington’s failed efforts to save his worst-ever movie: “There were things I thought were too much”
By his own admission, Denzel Washington went through a bit of a rough patch in the 1990s, coming clean and confessing that there were too many movies that he’d made for no other reason than the money.
In his defence, there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, he was already an Academy Award winner who’d been embraced as one of his era’s finest actors, and having battled his way to the top and won the acclaim to guarantee that he stayed there, who in his position wouldn’t want to get as rich as possible?
It was a period defined by a number of “clunkers,” as he put it, and while he didn’t name names, it’s not difficult to pick them out of a line-up. Virtuosity, The Fallen, The Bone Collector, and The Siege all rank among the worst-reviewed entries in his filmography, and it can’t be a coincidence that they were all released in the mid-to-late ’90s.
However, he kicked off the decade with the single worst film that he’s ever been in: writer and director James D Parriott’s execrable Heart Condition. Befitting a production from Steve Tisch, the mastermind behind the gallingly racist 1986 comedy Soul Man, which features Thomas C Howell as a law student who disguises himself in blackface to qualify for a college scholarship, it hasn’t aged too well.
In a buddy caper that’s so offensive it beggars belief, Bob Hoskins’ openly bigoted police officer has a rivalry with Washington’s slick lawyer, Napoleon Stone. When he starts dating the racist cop’s ex, things between them get even more heated, until a mind-boggling body swap angle pivots the entire picture.
Hoskins’ Jack Mooney is hospitalised after a heart attack, just as Stone dies in a car accident. Naturally, when the law enforcement officer wakes up, he discovers he’s been the recipient of a heart transplant, with his mortal nemesis supplying the organ. Not only that, but Washington’s ghost stars haunting him, trying to convince Mooney to solve his death.
Even when it was being shot, rumours swirled that the leading man wanted the script reworked, and he didn’t deny it. “I suggest changes on all of my films, and I’m getting braver with every film,” he told The New York Times before Heart Condition‘s release. “There were things in the script that I thought were too much.”
What did he want changed or toned down? The racism, of course. “Denzel felt he, as a screen presence, would not tolerate racial slurs being hurled at him,” Tisch helpfully explained. Since the final cut is still remarkably racist throughout, you’ve got to wonder how bad the first draft must have been.
When it hit cinemas, it was immediately greeted as Washington’s worst-ever movie. 35 years later, and it still hasn’t been knocked off of its perch, with Parriott admitting that it didn’t exactly further his career, and helped swear him off the comedy genre for over 20 years.
