'Out of Time': Humid crime thriller is a tangle of twists

The last time Denzel Washington hooked up with director Carl Franklin he was led astray by a mysterious woman. That was in the 1995 noir thriller "Devil in a Blue Dress." Things haven't changed all that much in this humid, small-town crime story.

MOVIE REVIEW

OUT OF TIME

DIRECTOR: Carl Franklin

CAST: Denzel Washington, Sanaa Lathan, Dean Cain, Eva Mendes

RUNNING TIME: 109 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for language, violence, sexual content

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8 Cinema, East Valley 13, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Kirkland Parkplace, Lewis & Clark, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B-

Franklin is noted for his forays into the underbelly of brutality and betrayal, and his 1992 cult favorite, "One False Move," is a perfect example of his ability to mine the essence of the genre.

Here Washington plays Matt Lee Whitlock, chief of police in the faded Florida Gulf Coast town of Banyan Key. When Whitlock and his ambitious, soon to be ex-wife Alex (Eva Mendes), who has just been promoted to detective of homicide in Miami, reunite to solve an arson that has left two bodies charred to a crisp, the case takes a turn for the unexpected.

Whitlock finds that he is implicated in the murders and soon to be a prime suspect because all the evidence, which has snared him in a net of lies and duplicity, points his way. Whitlock races against time, tripping through twists and turns in order to clear himself -- and unravel the riddle of who, what, where, when and mostly, why?

For all the story's tenseness, two-time Oscar-winner Washington plays it loose and relaxed. The actor has the propensity to seem a little uptight sometimes in his roles, as if he isn't always enjoying what he's doing. But he's the glue that holds together the often flimsy screenplay by Dave Collard, who previously wrote for a TV series.

The script thrashes and twists like a swordfish out of water and its plot detours are meant to funnel toward a taut and suspenseful climax, but there's not much in there that we haven't seen before in the better, far more original neo-noir steamer "Body Heat" or the convoluted bayou mystery "Heaven's Prisoner's."

More often than not, the turns seem simply like convenient diversions to mask a story that isn't very plausible or realistic even though it gets the atmosphere just right with its town that has seen better days.

Although budding star Mendes and Washington sparked in "Training Day," there's less chemistry between them this time as she glowers and frets in her role as a big-city cop. But the rest of the supporting cast -- Dean Cain, Sanaa Lathan and John Billingsley -- are solid and lend the right sweaty grit to Washington's appealing, cool-in-the-face-of-heat presence.

Paula Nechak is a Seattle free-lance movie writer. She can be reached at nechak@hotmail.com.