Instead Matt manipulates faxes, intercepts calls, lies to federal officials, convinces his best friend to cover for him, chases down suspects and stolen cash, and attempts to stay one step ahead of investigators, lest his good intentions lead him down a road to prison. Out of Time marks the sixth time in his career that Washington has played a cop; certainly he should know better than to make such rookie mistakes.
Out of Time, directed by Carl Franklin (One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress), is actually two movies: one a languid, bittersweet love story, starring Washington and Brown Sugar's Lathan as doomed old flames, playing with fire behind the back of Lathan's volatile ex-jock husband, Chris (ex-Superman Dean Cain); the other a breathlessly hyperactive thriller, starring Washington and Mendes as a once-and-future couple, reconciling over a crime in which all the evidence points to Matt as the guilty party. The two films intersect twice: in a smoldering, arson-ravaged house, where two crispy corpses lie in a melted mattress, and in a dead-end shack, where a raging storm's lightning bolts illuminate secrets to which the audience is already privy. Franklin manages to reconcile the tones of both films like a con artist: He suckers us into the story of a condemned romance, then gives us instead a wry, tense little thriller in which a man who believes himself smart discovers he's just a schmuck. And till the last 10 minutes, it's a gas.
It all feels reminiscent of Roger Donaldson's No Way Out, with Washington in the Kevin Costner role as the man trying to distract, deflect, and mislead those who are moments away from putting him at the scene of the crime. Out of Time doesn't have that film's kinky kicker -- even in the driving rain, you can see this ending in the far-off horizon -- but instead lifts its style and tension. It's a lark, silly and taut and loaded down with zooming cameras and quick-cut edits and other pulpy conventions that signify playfulness more than pressure, but keep us engaged and entertained. It's a movie about the thrill of movies, actually, about seeing an innocent man put in jeopardy through his good deeds; Hitchcock made his legend out of cooking up popcorn like this and dipping it in gold.
Franklin, once a maker of "serious" and "thoughtful" thrillers grounded in the politics of race and social status, has of late given in to the giddy, harmless potboiler. His High Crimes, one of those Ashley Judd thrillers indistinguishable from the rest of her filmography, provided the first bit of evidence he had detoured off the high road. That doesn't make Out of Time any less enjoyable, only kind of meaningless -- a thriller with delights that wear off before the credits even roll, a movie you might watch on cable some Saturday afternoon and decide afterward that you didn't really waste that much time.
Washington, two years removed from flossing his teeth with Ethan Hawke in Training Day, is slumming -- no heavy lifting required to break a sweat in Florida during the summer, where standing still will drench you. He's done this role before, and better, in such films as The Mighty Quinn, which was casual and elegant about its humor; its pacing was unhurried, its mystery more mystifying, its humidity more glamorous. (In Out of Time, everyone seems to be sweating the sweat of a thousand showers; they don't look sexy so much as in need of a bar of soap and a fresh change of clothes.) Here, the screenplay, by first-timer David Collard, is so enamored of its tricks and fakeouts that it never stops to consider the people caught in them; they ultimately become cups in a shell game. Were it anyone but Washington above the title, we might not even care at all. The only thing keeping us engaged is his humor and grace under pressure; his Matt may have done some stupid things, like giving seized drug money to a girlfriend he believes is dying of cancer, but we root for him because, well, he is Denzel Washington.
