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"We need you to come, quick!"

There are movies that invite you to sympathize with a protagonist who shouts the truth from the rooftops, but nobody believes him. Carl Franklin's Out of Time is an interesting twist on this popular scenario: its main character knows the real facts, knows what they logically add up to, and can't let the others make the deduction for themselves. It's a situation similar to that of poor Manny Balestrero in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, though the innocent sap here is more proactive about keeping the seemingly incriminating evidence under wraps.

More complications. Matt Whitlock (Denzel Washington) isn't just a poor schmo but the town sheriff, and his problems stem not from a freakishly random conglomeration of evidence against him, but from numerous personal indiscretions and scandalously unwise, spur-of-the-moment decisions. A white lie becomes a dozen, and eventually forms a web of deceit that Whitlock cannot hope to keep up for very long.

Am I being horrendously oblique? Sorry. Having recently rediscovered the joy of going into a film completely cold, I was trying to protect those with the same mindset, but we'll be getting more specific henceforth, so you may want to bail out. In the process of divorcing his homicide detective wife (Eva Mendes), Matt gets re-involved with his high school sweetheart Ann (Sanaa Lathan), who is married to a former pro quarterback and a wife-beating jerk (Dean Cain). When he learns that Ann has terminal cancer, Matt steals evidence money to help her pay for an expensive alternative treatment, and she reciprocates by making him her life insurance beneficiary, and when life insurance is involved in a movie like this, nothing good can come of it.

Indeed, Ann's house explodes with her and her husband ostensibly inside, the facts incontrovertibly point to arson, and Matt is forced to conceal all recent relations with Ann and her husband. The amount of evidence stacked against him is truly staggering -- there's an eyewitness, for goodness' sake -- but Matt's position of integrity in his community helps him out... for a while.

Matt has to escape his pursuers in impossibly orchestrated and absurdly suspenseful cat-and-mouse scenes in which circumstances always just barely line up to give him a last minute out of his desperate situation. This results in excitement that feels distinctly artificial, and "contrived" is definitely an complaint that can be levied without, I think, even much complaint from director Carl Franklin, whose High Crimes similarly had tension despite a convenient and manipulative script. There are only so many places Denzel can put that briefcase; the whole thing reminded me of those slapstick comedies where the principals play catch with a baby to keep it from harm.

This creates other problems -- the final twist, for example, arrives without much dramatic force, perhaps because we have become accustomed to being jerked around -- but to be honest, I found none of them particularly ruinous. Out of Time knows how to have fun, and isn't afraid of breaking some plausibility rules to do it. Having just written that some of the set pieces are "impossibly orchestrated," I have to add that they are also quite gloriously orchestrated: I laughed, but I also precariously slid forward in my seat.

Listen to the soundtrack, which begins as amusingly jazzy and remains jazzy throughout, though consistently becoming less amusing. Watch the way Franklin and Washington play with the notion of the righteous movie hero: Matt Whitlock is undoubtedly in the right, but the way he goes about establishing this is decidedly amoral, and sometimes downright unethical. Most importantly, be amused by the ludicrous coincidences and improbable triumphs along the way. Out of Time doesn't insult your intelligence unless you are intent on being insulted. It's all in the mindset: you can be indignant, but you're supposed to laugh.

I'd also like to comment that Dean Cain has done a pretty decent job of making us forget that he played Superman not so long ago. Here, he is just pure evil. That's admirable.