"Out of Time"

With the sensational Denzel Washington surrounded by beautiful women and sweaty Florida heat, director Carl Franklin delivers a sexy screwball-noir packed with pop and sizzle.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 3, 2003 | Crafted and crafty, "Out of Time" makes for a dandy evening out. This smart comic thriller might seem just a well-done genre exercise if it weren't such a good example of the solid workmanship Hollywood has largely abandoned. And the movie is modest enough that it can keep you from seeing how director Carl Franklin, doing his best work since "Devil in a Blue Dress," and gifted first-time screenwriter Dave Collard are playing with the conventions of genre (just as they play with racial and sexual conventions). "Out of Time" starts out as noir, takes a shift into something like deadpan screwball comedy and ends up as a comedy of remarriage.

The movie opens with a terrific porno-comic sequence. In the middle of a lonely night shift, Matt Whitlock (Denzel Washington), the sheriff of a small town outside Miami, gets a call about a burglar from Ann Merai Harrison (Sanaa Lathan), the wife of a former pro football player (Dean Cain) now reduced to working as a security guard. When Matt goes to the house to investigate, the burglary story turns out to be one of the little fantasy scenarios Ann cooks up as a prelude to hot sex with Matt. It's the type of fast and nasty sex scene that you don't often get in American movies, and though we don't see much more than Washington and Lathan kissing, Franklin brings the camera close in to them so that we can feast on the hungriness of the kisses. It's funny and sexy at the same time, and Franklin and Collard cap the scene with a satisfying pair of perfectly timed double entendres.

Sex just seems more at home in the humidity of South Florida, where every breath, every movement reminds you of your own body. (Instead of making the tropical pastels pop at you, cinematographer Theo van de Sande mutes them so that every setting -- even the most workaday one -- feels awash in sultriness.) Crime seems more at home in that fetid atmosphere as well.

"Out of Time" is one of those movies you'll enjoy a lot more if you go in knowing as little of the plot as possible, so I'm going to be stingy about the specifics. Needless to say, the combination of Matt's willingness to be led around by his dick, and the $485,000 in drug money awaiting pickup by the feds in his office safe, soon lands him in an incriminating situation.

You can see Matt being set up all through the first half of the movie. Franklin and Collard treat the signifiers of his suckerdom with relish, but the obviousness is also part of the surprise they're waiting to spring. The second half of "Out of Time" is a series of elaborate variations on one good, steadily expanding joke: How Matt uses his position to get out of a series of tight spots. He's like a black Count of Monte Cristo bearing the burden of Sisyphus -- as soon as he fashions one escape, another predicament pops up to ensnare him.

Franklin and Collard have grasped the same thing that Bill Duke realized in his film of Chester Himes' novel "A Rage in Harlem," namely just how close noir is to low comedy. They're both motivated by greed and lust. What Franklin and Collard have pulled off in "Out of Time" is to merge noir with the comedy of infidelity. The Miami police detective assigned to work with Matt is his estranged wife, Alex (Eva Mendes). Not only does he have to hide the evidence that appears to implicate him in the crime they're investigating, he has to hide his dalliance with Ann.

It isn't exactly right to say that this section of "Out of Time" requires delicacy. But it does require crackerjack timing, and plotting that keeps springing like a series of mousetraps that just miss Matt's rear end (as well as other, more tender parts). The suspense Franklin and Collard work up here is the kind that keeps you laughing. Part of the reason it works is that -- unexpectedly -- Denzel Washington makes such a good dupe. Washington is a sometimes-great actor without much playfulness in him and almost no sense of humor. At times, his off-screen reputation as a beacon of integrity has seemed to invade his performances, weighing him down with the sort of virtue that does no actor any favors. That's why it was great to see him throw all that off in "Training Day" and play an out-and-out sleazeball.

What Franklin does with Washington here is even slyer, introducing duplicity into his star's upright, honest-man persona. We're used to noirs that put us in complicity with the guilty man who's trying to keep from being caught. Washington's Matt is the (partly) innocent man who couldn't be in more trouble if he was guilty. He's hero and sucker in one package. Washington uses his usual intense stoicism as the poker face of a grown man about to get his hand caught in the cookie jar. Sanaa Lathan is the cookie jar. In "Love and Basketball" and "Brown Sugar," Lathan showed a talent for playing nice girls without making them icky-sweet.

Next Page: Eva Mendes -- the lips and Roman profile of Gina Gershon and the lusciousness of the young Raquel Welch

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