Denzel Washington isn’t one of the best actors ever for no reason. Albeit, he doesn’t have the amount of significant awards that he should have deserved, he’s a phenomenal actor – dare I say, legendary, because he always seems to take a role and add his charisma and talent to make it believable for us, the audience. This movie role may not be his best (it’s hard to really say what his best is), but it’s a great role to show that there’s always a crime to be paid although you did the right thing. Life isn’t fair, but when it comes to our decision making, we can make things a little easier for ourselves instead of turning it into a roller-coaster affair. Who wants that? Not me, and I know for a fact that you don’t.

Airplanes were something that frightened me for a long time (blame 9/11; and I’m not being ignorant) and heights was something I couldn’t deal with either, but last year (2011) I got onto a plane and took my first flight. It’s natural for many people to freak out and pray that the worst doesn’t happen. Nothing happened to me – it was a great flight, but there’s always the “what if” factor. This movie is the ‘what if’ that nobody wants to experience. Denzel was somewhat of a guardian angel in a disastrous situation – a guardian angel with some inner demons to deal with.

Drugs & Alcohol are things that a lot of people have to deal with in life. How people deal with it all depends on how they manage it. I don’t know abusers, but I know people who drink and do drugs. I’ve seen it and I know pretty much their behaviours. Kendrick Lamar has a song called ‘Swimming Pools’ and he goes into detail about his experiences around alcohol abuse within his family. Seeing people ‘live their life in bottles’ is a great analogy to explain alcohol abusers; Denzel portrayed one. We’ve all seen movies that have alcohol abuse depicted, but what happens when the alcohol abuser is a hero? You save many lives and you lose some – somebody has to pay, right? Every action has consequences.

The majority of the movie is about the struggle that Denzel had to go through to discover that he himself was living a lie stuck in a bottle, and continuing to do so would impact not only himself, but the people around him that try to help him ‘get clean’. There are shows like ‘Intervention’ that show everyday people that deal with substance & alcohol abuse, but at the end of it all, you really don’t know whose an abuser behind the scenes. It had a great message, and the fact that Alcohol abuse is an everyday issue that people continue to struggle with, it helped shed light that no matter what you’re doing, continuing to live a life full of lying to yourself and others to hide your own addiction only hurts you more.

Denzel was great and the supporting cast did their part to deliver a great movie. It’s definitely one to see this year, so check it out. But for now, this is my opinion; this is my review

That’s My Word & It STiXX