Review
OUT OF TIME
Starring Denzel Washington and Eva Mendes
Directed by Carl Franklin
Opens Friday, October 3
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The tag line reads, "How do you solve a murder when all the evidence points to you?" The real question should be, "How do you sell that old saw without an electrifying set of saucy photographs of the producer you are pitching to?" Perhaps all you really have to say is, "Remember Denzel in Devil in a Blue Dress."
Denzel Washington plays Matt Lee Whitlock, a conflicted and slightly troubled chief of police in a sleepy Florida town. He drinks where and when he feels like it. His wife, Eva Mendes, who just made detective, has left him. His new girlfriend has a violent husband. On the upside – he just made a big bust and has all the ill-gotten booty sitting snug in his office safe. Wait – that may not be an upside.
He naively (perhaps too naively for a cop) tries to help his girlfriend using the money he’s supposed to be watching, and it all (surprise!) blows up in his face. The fun of this film is watching Washington’s character stay one step ahead of his department and his wife as he tries to wriggle out of his predicament.
After the first five minutes of predictably dreadful dialogue, the banter gets pretty good, particularly between Whitlock and the department’s larcenous booze-hound coroner, played by John Billingsley III. The setting in Florida also gives the film an interesting, small-town flavour. However, sometimes the town is so small that no character can get away with picking their nose without their neighbours knowing about it, and sometimes it’s so big that Whitlock and his adulterous girlfriend can kiss openly in the streets.
Problems really arise with the antagonists of the story. What is being attempted is a pretty intricate scheme that requires something the bad guys seem very short on – smarts. The filmmakers don’t construct the film very well, which doesn’t help matters. Scenes that would have provided a good opportunity to make the plot a little more of a whodunit turn out to be perfunctory set-ups without grace or guile. In the old "poke around the room with gun drawn" scene, the shower curtain being thrown back is more jarring than when the bad guy actually jumps out.
Still, since I went to this film expecting absolutely nothing, I was pleasantly surprised by the mostly non-cliché dialogue, tension, decent fight scenes and strong characters (the good guys, anyway). |
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