When a movie has a title as bland, as devoid of meaning or resonance, as Out of Time, you have to wonder how much original thought went into the script. In the case of Out of Time, it’s not a matter of the writers having expended so much creative energy on the script that they didn’t have any left over for the title; they just had no inspiration at all.
Denzel Washington plays Matt Whitlock, a police chief in a sleepy, sunny, seaside Florida town. The setting seems chosen to allow Washington to wear shorts; it certainly hasn’t been chosen for its hot, steamy potential, because Out of Time is about as steamy as a glass of water.
The movie starts with Whitlock answering a call for help from an attractive woman in the middle of the night. When he arrives, we note that she’s rather overdressed and far too meticulously made-up for this time of night, so clearly there’s another agenda afoot. Sure enough, before the credits have finished rolling, we’ve had two bad risqué jokes that feel like they’ve been lifted straight from a James Bond movie of the Roger Moore era.
If only the rest of the movie had even a smidgen of that watery wit. As it is, it takes itself alarmingly seriously while shuffling Hollywood clichés like a dog-eared pack of cards. In fact, Out of Time doesn’t have a plot so much as a pretzel. Besides the duplicities that seem to come naturally to him, Chief Whitlock finds himself investigating the murder of a woman he has been romancing (Sanaa Lathan), as well as that of her husband (Dean Cain), who of course had ample reason to detest Whitlock. He’s in a compromising position, madly covering up, and guess who is deployed to investigate the double murder alongside him? His estranged wife (Eva Mendes) — who, naturally, is also a police officer. And then there’s something to do with a lot of drug-bust cash Whitlock is supposed to be keeping safe.
The American fixation on adultery frames Out of Time, and the movie is driven by the fascination for policepersons — who are more often than not as corrupt or as criminal as the law-breakers they pursue. Clearly both the institution of marriage, as ossified in the Victorian era, and the institutions of justice and retribution in the United States are under strain. Only a deep ideological confusion could generate such a welter of anxieties and thus the endless supply of plots dealing with such issues.
The cops are heroes in movie after movie and TV show after TV show, followed closely (on TV at least) by teams of lawyers battling it out in what is supposed to be the fairest legal system in the world. This means, on the surface, that the rule of law is venerated in the US, and those responsible for upholding it are worthy of respect. Except that they are presented as most romantically appealing when they are breaking the law, or bending it to suit their own purposes, or even doing that admirably macho thing of torturing suspects to get vital information. As long as the cop, who is obviously above the law, gets the criminal, that’s all fine. Good people are allowed to get away with bad things. It’s just hard to know, outside the codes of Hollywood filmmaking, who’s good and who’s bad.
Such ambiguities have been examined honestly in movies such as To Live and Die in LA, where the moral ambivalence of the law-enforcers is foregrounded. A movie like Out of Time, however, has no time for any nuanced storytelling, let alone characters with more than one personality trait. The exigencies of the thriller plot here ensure that more time is spent generating twists than making them, or the people they happen to, plausible. It’s all about as complicated, self-serving and meaningful as the Vatican’s explanation of why there can’t be any women priests.
In the case of Out of Time, it’s a pity, because with a bit of atmosphere, and a little more script development, this could have been a good film noir. But the most noir thing here is Washington and his love interest. Otherwise, it’s sunny Florida in all its banal glory, and that pretzel of a plot.
If we’re meant to care about Chief Whitlock’s troubles, it must be on the basis of Washington’s previous cinematic roles. Elsewhere, in movies such as Antwone Fisher, he has cultivated that air of likeable gravitas. Despite Washington’s attempts to expand his repertoire in films such as Training Day, it could only be on the basis of his previous heroic and/or nice-guy roles that we can have any positive feelings for his character in Out of Time. Which is a bit of a cheat.
If you disregard those other roles, and concentrate only on Out of Time, all you have is a venal man, not even wicked enough to be really interesting, lacking charm (or indeed much life), and with only himself to blame. As the plot runs out of twists, one finds oneself out of patience and out of sympathy.