Out of Time Review
by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)October 8th, 2003
OUT OF TIME
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2003 David N. Butterworth
*** (out of ****)
Banyan Key, Fla. Population: 1,378. By the time Carl Franklin's splendid "Out of Time" kicks into high gear that number is down by two, the result of a double homicide courtesy an arsonist's homemade time bomb.
Several factors make Banyan's Chief of Police Matthias “Matt” Lee Whitlock's investigation that much harder. For starters his wife Alex, from whom he's been separated these past eight months, just made detective and is officially handling the murder case. To add insult to injury, she's also just served Matt divorce papers--talk about a double whammy! More disturbingly, however, is the fact that all of the evidence seems to point to the police chief: he was having an affair with one of the victims, a married woman who recently named him beneficiary of her $1 million life insurance policy; Matt had a volatile relationship with the woman's abusive ex-quarterback husband aka corpse #2; and an elderly eye witness spotted Matt prowling around the couple's house the night of the towering inferno.
As if all this wasn't enough, there's a nasty--and extremely impatient--DEA official breathing down Matt's neck, demanding the return of $485,000 worth of drug money that Matt unfortunately gave to his (now deceased) lover to pay for experimental cancer treatments at a Swiss clinic. The whole tricky business is going up in flames and Matt is quickly running out of time.
Quick. Name a bad Denzel Washington movie. "Carbon Copy"? "Virtuosity," maybe? Definitely "The Preacher's Wife." Now name a bad Denzel Washington *performance*. Well I can't think of one. Washington's Chief Whitlock proves another class act from the Oscar®-winning star of "Training Day." He's worked with director Franklin before (on the steamy noir thriller "Devil in a Blue Dress") and it shows; in "Out of Time" Washington pulls out all the stops as a basically honorable man who makes a few too many wrong decisions and spends much of the movie trying to atone for them (at speeds exceeding the legal limit!).
Talking of speed, "2 Fast 2 Furious"'s Eva Mendes (as imminent ex- Alex Diaz-Whitlock) proves herself every bit as tough and sexy as her male co-star. Think Cindy Crawford with acting skills. John Billingsley plays a waggish medical examiner and provides light relief to Washington's harried, high-octane cop. Billingsley nicely affords his character just the right amount of likable charm and geek squad vulnerability. Less effective is "Love and Basketball"'s Sanaa Lathan, who sleepwalks her way through the role of Whitlock's hapless mistress Anne Merai Harrison.
Franklin, who proved he had a knack for this tough, calculated stuff back with his impressive debut "One False Move" (with Bill “We're Cheetos, man!” Paxton), once again keeps the action moving quickly and smartly, keeping Matt (and the audience) one step ahead of the opposition (make that one half step ahead of the competition). So nicely paced is the film that you get caught up in the escalating drama (such as when Matt feverishly removes his name from faxed telephone records, or races up and down a hotel stairwell trying to avoid his colleagues, or cleverly delays the government goons who come looking for their payout) rather than questioning the roles coincidence and contrivance play in all of this.
There are a lot of very close calls in "Out of Time," but Franklin's direction, and the clever manipulations of the script (by David Collard), keeps matters taut and credible.
I only wish the producers could have come up with a better title for the film since, a year from now, it will disappear among copies of the similarly--and generically--titled "Out of Sight" and "Nick of Time" on your local Blockbuster shelves.
The non-stock and thrilling "Out of Time" deserves better exposure than that.
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David N. Butterworth
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