It's a twisty, hell-for-leather crime thriller, and director Carl Franklin gives it all the slick, modern trimmings.

Entertainingly deft sleight-of-hand thriller.

In apparent atonement for whatever wayward thinking led him down the Freeman-Judd path, Franklin has transformed Out of Time into a highly felicitous comedy of infidelities and busted-up romances.

The movie is casually, glamorously multiracial, and Washington is great fun, but the final glory belongs to actor John Billingsley, who plays one of those rumpled minor characters plugged into thrillers to keep you guessing whether they're light relief or something more sinister, and who, in a few memorably funny scenes, shuffles away with the movie.

Cross "Body Heat" with "No Way Out" and you wind up with Out of Time, a slick crime melodrama with more style than substance.