Out of Time
Banyan Key is a small town in Florida where everybody knows your name. Matt Whitlock (Denzel Washington) presides over the town as police chief. High on cloud nine after a drug bust but going through a divorce with Alex (Eva Mendes), he finds comfort with Anne (Sanaa Lathan), married to an abusive former quarterback (Dean Cain). Anne soon finds out she has terminal cancer and that her husband has secretly upped her life insurance policy to $1 million. So, she transfers the beneficiary to Matt while accepting his money from the drug bust to flee to Switzerland where an experimental cancer treatment is being developed. Plans for that burn away into thin air as Anne's house burns down with the remains of two bodies, presumably husband and wife. Now it's become a homicide case with Alex coming on board as lead detective. With a witness placing Matt at the scene, $1 million heading his way as beneficiary, an affair with the deceased, and missing drug money, all the clues point to him and he needs to solve who did this before the detectives can put all their pieces together.

Washington is one of those actors whom audiences will come out to see whatever he does. Here, he makes the best out of an average movie by combining two recent performances: playing good guy forced bad in “John Q” and his award-winning portrayal of a corrupt cop in “Training Day”. His work here doesn’t reach either of those extremes but nevertheless, it’s something we’ve seen from Washington before and he’s good at it. Working with director Carl Franklin, the movie looks pretty good, offering a good portrayal of the Florida keys but the underlying tension seems to be missing when for one thing, the whole film is fairly predictable, save for a few details, and the second is the camera sometimes shifts away from the action to other shots of no significance, whether it’s for comic relief or to remind us that hey, Eva Mendes is in the movie. By the end, it’s only a matter of how Whitlock can explain the situation he’s been in, and even that turns out to be a bit muddled. 2.5 stars