Directed by Carl Franklin
Written by David Collard
Starring
- Denzel Washington as Matt Lee Whitlock
- Eva Mendes as Alex Diaz Whitlock
- Sanaa Lathan as Ann Merai Harrison
Jonny can't stand Florida... Out of Time showed some promise for its first half, but then just descended into typical, mindless Hollywood-thriller pulp for its latter half. Yes, for some reason the hysterical woman has a gun (yawn) pointed at the man she loves but then the estranged ex-wife shows up and dusts the hysterical woman. But, I should back up, because that is the actual climax. I know, I know, you’re all going to cry “Wah! Spoilers!” but with such a dumb plot, who cares? I mean if me telling you that Denzel Washington lives at the end spoils anything for you, you’ve got much larger problems than Ruthless Reviews. Like, you could have Downs Syndrome or vote for Bush or something.
Here’s the set up. Inexplicably, Denzel Washington is romantically involved with the two hottest women in Florida. One’s his ex-wife, Alex (Eva Mendes), and the other, Ann Merai (Sanaa Lathan), is his high school sweetheart. These days, he’s having an affair with Ann Merai even though she’s married. The guy she’s married to happens to not only be an ex-NFL quarterback, but he’s a real cocksucker, too. Now the town Denzel lives in has 1300 people in it and I’m supposed to believe that there are, not one, but two women who look like that in a town that size? Sure... Look, women that good looking do not come from towns of 1300 people. Er, well, if they do, they leave and head for New York or Los Angeles. Anywho, Denzel is about as subtle with his philandering as President Bush is with his smirks. That the whole town doesn’t know what is going on between he and Ann Merai is the biggest mystery in Out of Time.
Denzel has impounded half a million dollars from some big drug bust he just made. The money is in a safe and not only does Denzel look at the money from time to time, but his dufus lackey, Chae (John Billingsley), is constantly trying to get Denzel to steal the money and then the two of them can move down to Costa Rica together and get a fishing boat. Even though both of them are married. I need to point out that I HATE comic relief characters like Chae. I just fucking hate them. I find them all equally as nauseating as Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character from Twister. Useless fucking windbags that have zero analogy to anything that might one day be misconstrued as “real.” Anyhow, suddenly Ann Merai comes down with liver and lung cancer, makes Denzel the sole beneficiary on her $1,000,000 life insurance policy and starts to talk more seriously about leaving her abusive husband. Yo, Officer Whitlock! Setup! Get the fuck out of there!! Hurry! Fucking run! Instead, Denzel gives Ann Merai the half-million dollars so she can partake in an experimental Swiss program. Then, her and her husband fake their own deaths and Denzel not only has to bring both of them to justice, but he has to recover the money that he stole.
The trouble with the movie, or as I should say, part of the trouble with the movie is that the stakes are never high enough. There is this over the top dramatic moment where Denzel is trying to get his phone number off of the “dead” people’s phone records. So he intercepts a fax, scans it into his machine with an OCR reader, opens it in Word, deletes every instance of his name and number and sends it back to the fax machine... but, I mean, so what? “Um, is this your phone number?” “Yes, I was friends with the dead husband.” In other words, it is a thriller for the sake of being a thriller. I mean, the officer he has to worry about is his ex-wife who is still in love with him. Ooh, scary! She’s really going throw the book at him. Yeah, let’s just leave it at that.
Out of Time is a well made movie that takes itself
way too seriously. The viewer is never engaged so much as they are actively waiting for the movie to end.
