Denzel Washington is a mighty actor, in possession of a gravitas most can only dream of, more than able to lend his talent to the works of Shakespeare or portraying major historical figures like Malcolm X. Yet for decades now he’s also seemed to relish working on material that should be well beneath someone of his stature, enjoying the task of pulling ropey scripts and concepts up to his level. Early reviews have widely deemed him the best part of Ridley Scott’s uneven Gladiator II; his history of elevating the source material is long-standing.

Though he came to fame in the eighties, going from a lead on TV medical drama St. Elsewhere to an Oscar winner for Glory in just seven short years, the nineties were when Washington truly became a megastar. The decade gave us his towering turns in Malcolm X, Crimson Tide, Philadelphia, and The Hurricane – big, muscular movies, often centered around his commanding presence. Scattered among those, however, were a handful that were just…silly. But those movies, as much as the ones that won him all his deserved acclaim, show why his star has remained ascendant for so many years.

In the first, 1991’s Ricochet, Washington is a cop – Nick Styles – who puts psychopathic killer Earl Talbot Blake (John Lithgow) in jail. Eight years later, Blake manages to bust out. He heads straight for Styles – now an Assistant District Attorney –  with revenge on his mind Ricochet’s premise is conventional, but the violence is intense – at one point, a man gets a circular saw straight through the belly. In true 1990s style, almost every bloody act is accompanied by a gleeful, profane witticism; it’s the kind of movie where an impalement is met with “You got the point now, don’t you?”

In his entire filmography, it’s hard to pick out a scene that more encapsulates Washington’s charismatic resplendence than when he first arrests Lithgow’s villain at a nighttime carnival. Styles gets a gun on Blake, but when an unaware woman steps out of a nearby port-a-potty, Blake takes her hostage. To persuade him to release her, Styles makes a show of disarming himself, even stripping down to his boxers to prove he has no hidden weapon or armour, all the while trying to calm the terrified woman. Blake then pushes her aside and launches himself at Styles – who somehow has managed to hide a gun, and manages to subdue the criminal.

Ricochet is a ludicrous movie, yet it makes Washington’s charm textual in a way that would set the scene for many a future film of his. And four years later, things got sillier still for him in Virtuosity.

Here Washington plays Parker Barnes: a former cop convicted for killing the man who murdered his wife and daughter. Barnes and other convicts have been part of testing for a virtual reality training programme meant to pit police against SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe), an AI programmed on the personalities of 200 serial killers – including the one who killed Barnes’ family. When a renegade technician brings SID 6.7 into the real world, Barnes is the only one who can stop him.

Russell Crowe has by far the flashiest role in Virtuosity, and he sure does enjoy it, oozing merry malevolence, and making a three-course meal out of each of his cruel taunts (12 years later the two actors would face off again in American Gangster, where Washington got the showier villain part). Between Crowe’s hammy psychopathy and the movie’s fascination with VR – the effects now look endearingly dated but were at the time considered cutting edge – it’s just Washington’s steady performances as the grieving, furious hero that gives Virtuosity any kind of emotional weight. His willingness to put the charisma on a low boil, to cede the humour and spectacle to Crowe while he deals with the heavy stuff, is almost solely responsible for keeping the whole thing from bursting apart at the seams.

Washington played a police officer once again in the final film of his nineties trilogy of nonsense – 1998’s Fallen. Though his character, John Hobbes, watches serial killer Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas) put to death, somehow that doesn’t stop the string of murders carried out to Reese’s macabre modus operandi. At first Hobbes and his fellow cops assume there’s a copycat on the loose. Before long, he learns the real culprit lies in a different realm entirely.

The full absurdity of Fallen takes a while to make itself known. Directed by Gregory Hoblit, straight after his hugely successful Primal Fear, and co-starring Donald Sutherland, John Goodman, and James Gandolfini, it looks comparatively classy next to the twin lunacies of Ricochet and Virtuosity…until it’s revealed that it’s Reese’s demonic spirit continuing his murder spree, using unwitting bodies (mainly human, sometimes feline!) as his vessels, and passing between them via touch. For the remainder of the movie, Washington effectively finds himself playing tag with a demon.

Even after Fallen has unveiled the heights of its silliness, Washington remains commanding. In the scene where he’s told what’s really going on, he moves from “Oh, come on!” scepticism to whole-hearted belief in a matter of seconds, making his personal change of mind convincing, and (at least temporarily) bringing us along with him. It may be a preposterous movie, but it’s a masterful performance.

Washington’s habit of mixing high and low art expanded well out beyond the nineties, most notably in his frequent collaborations with director Tony Scott. Across five films, from 1995 to 2010, the actor time travelled, stopped runaway trains, and saved the day in countless other ways, elevating schlocky material into the stuff of poetry. After that came The Equalizer movies, where Washington took his ex-CIA agent on a surprisingly moving emotional arc, through a myriad of violent, often outrageous set pieces. Time and again, from the nineties to the present day, he’s made even the most throwaway of movies feel utterly gripping.

In a very real sense, making nonsense films like Ricochet, Virtuosity, and Fallen emotionally credible is every inch as challenging as the trickiest Shakespearian soliloquy. That Washington excels at both is a major part of what makes him such a peerless screen presence and us in the audience so lucky to have him.