‘Out Of Time’ at 20: Don’t Let The Generic Title Dissuade You From Watching This Criminally Overlooked Denzel Washington Neo-Noir

With the recent success of The Equalizer 3, box office analyst Gitesh Pandya dubbed Denzel Washington “Mr. Consistency” at the box office, pointing out that over the course of the past 19 years, almost all  of his wide releases as a leading man have opened to at least $20 million in the U.S. (and although Pandya didn’t say so, these movies all went on to gross at least $60 million, usually more). The odd movie out is The Little Things, which has a major pandemic asterisk: It came out in January 2021, when many theaters were still closed, and debuted simultaneously on HBO Max. But there’s another exception of sorts on Washington’s filmography, without which his streak of $20 million wide-release openers would extend all the way back before the turn of the century: Out of Time, the rare Washington-fronted project that did middling (though by many standards, still respectable) business at the box office before slinking into semi-obscurity rather than becoming a Sunday-afternoon cable mainstay. This overlooked gem turned 20 this month, and but this anniversary hasn’t exactly inspired a flood of anniversary appreciation pieces.

That’s too bad, though, because Out of Time is a superior example of exactly the genre Washington specializes in as a movie star: The slick, adult-oriented thriller. Washington’s favored collaborators for these type of movies have been the late, great Tony Scott, who directed him in Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Unstoppable; and, after Scott’s untimely passing, Antoine Fuqua, who directed Washington to his Best Actor Oscar in Training Day, then hooked back up for the Equalizer trilogy as well as a Magnificent Seven remake. 

Some of these pictures are terrific, mainly the best of the Washington/Scott collaborations, where the increasingly rococo style of Scott’s late-period direction externalizes the roiling conflict beneath Washington’s rock-solid exterior. But Washington is a generational acting talent in addition to an all-time movie star, and while his every project doesn’t require the gravity of his recent stage-to-screen translations like The Tragedy of Macbeth or Fences, he’s also capable of more than the elevation jobs he performs in those Equalizer movies. Rather than the cop-criminal-agent-mastermind matrix Washington so often occupies in his thrillers, Out of Time places him at the center of a Florida neo-noir as Matt Whitlock, the chief of police in a sleepy Florida town, who borrows from impounded drug money to finance cancer treatments for Ann (Sanaa Lathan), the married woman he’s secretly sleeping with. But when Ann and her husband turn up dead, Matt must scramble to cover his tracks – acting guiltier and guiltier to avoid, well, looking guilty. So Washington is simultaneously playing the flawed protagonist who gets in over his head and a Hitchcockian wrong man.

A lot of good noir is deceptively close to a comedy of errors, something the Coen Brothers have exploited with their hybrids of crime and farce. Carl Franklin, who directed Out of Time, is more straight-faced than the Coens, but he understands the thin line between laughter and gasps. As Matt bluffs his way through altering phone records, deceiving the DEA, and otherwise diverting the investigation until he can track down the missing money, Franklin’s camera movements become increasingly stylized, inviting the audience to share in Matt’s frenzy. Adding to the farcical overtones: The homicide detective looking into Ann’s death is Alex (Eva Mendes), Matt’s about-to-be-ex-wife. 

Washington is ideally cast as a guy with easy charm, little malice, but a certain moral grayness – a flexibility that allows him to play an adulterer, thief, and self-serving manipulator who nonetheless kinda-sorta feels like he’s doing the right thing. The thing is, we mostly agree with him. At times, Out of Time feels like it’s stacking the deck in favor of Washington’s likability, loading him up with good reasons for doing sketchy things. But that’s really just the noir mechanics at work, and Washington working in effortless concert with them to play a guy who, no matter his good intentions, is painfully unaware of why you should never do crimes to help a beautiful woman, especially in a humid Florida town.

Franklin, working with Washington a second time following the should-have-been-a-franchise-kickoff Devil in a Blue Dress, makes an ideal Florida noir, with popping blues and greens in the daytime giving way to traditionally noirish shadows and rain for a twisty, canted-angle climax. The film is lighter on its feet than the typical Scott or Fuqua programmer, with less quasi-operatic heavy-osity. It’s fun and fast-paced even though the only real “action” of the first two-thirds involves Washington hanging off a hotel balcony and sneaking out of the building before his colleagues can catch him. The sequence is a slightly heightened version of something that could have appeared in a crime picture from the 1940s – and 20 years later, that lends the film a timeless quality, even as some of the plot points revolve around landlines, faxes, and early cell-phone tech. The movie’s most dated accessories may not have the glamour of their 1940s counterparts, but they capture a transitional moment in technology and how it can be manipulated (and how it can’t be avoided). Now that a similar scene would require a period piece to recreate, there’s something evocative and specific about Matt delaying the arrival of incriminating evidence by surreptitiously sabotaging the office printer. That intercepted fax has more drama than the ornate executions of the Equalizer series, fun as those movies can be, and points to Franklin’s versatility within the noir genre, considering his Criterion-inducted Devil in a Blue Dress is more of a classic detective story with 1940s textures. 

Out of Time and Devil in a Blue Dress are more than enough to inspire fantasies of the additional genre entries Franklin and Washington could have made together; there’s a lot of leeway between the 1948 and 2003 settings of their two existing noirs, and plenty of room afterward. Frustratingly, Franklin has only made one feature film since Out of Time, a little-seen novel adaptation called Bless Me, Ultima. (He hasn’t been out of work; instead, he’s been snapped up by the prestige-TV boom, directing multiple episodes of Mindhunter and The Leftovers, among many others.) In the meantime, Out of Time has such a generic title and logline, one more Denzel thriller that’s not from the director of Crimson Tide or Training Day, that it’s been easy to overlook. But in its quietly tense way, it’s a fine showcase for Washington’s way with frailty, his ability to convincingly wobble beneath his movie-star charm. In the 20 years since its release, he’s done plenty of great work. Out of Time might have been the last time he could be credibly overlooked. 

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.