Even that statuette would sweat in Miami

Went to see Denzel Washington in “Out of Sight” last night. Mary Pat and I were two of just 10 or so viewers at the 9:15 show. And as I watched the great Washington do his typically strong work, I was reminded that, like Anthony Hopkins, John Wayne and others before him, Washington won his Best Actor Oscar for the wrong film. “Training Day” was neither “Malcolm X” nor “The Hurricane.” Washington’s portrayal of Malcolm was so superior to Al Pacino’s blind Army officer in “Scent of a Woman” that it’s not even worth discussing. And his Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was at least equal to Kevin Spacey’s disaffected everyman in “American Beauty.”

Look, Washington is one of those actors who can read the phone book and make it sound interesting. In “Out of Time,” he has more than the phone book to work with. But just barely. “Out of Time” is a modern attempt to recreate a classic noir, one in which our hero, slightly flawed or worse, gets caught up in something that slowly, gradually, entices him into committing a crime — only to then grip him like a deep-sea squid at a buffet bar. And Washington is up to the task, the sweat pouring off him both literally and figuratively as he struggles to clear himself of a murder charge.

The problem is that the film takes the lazy path to resolution. While Florida makes a convincing setting for the crime novels of Elmore Leonard , Carl Hiaasen and James W. Hall, it looks too sunny and sea-side pretty to capture the darkness the way, say, Billy Wilder did with Los Angeles in “Double Indemnity” or Jacques Tourneur did with California, New Mexico and Nevada in “Out of the Past.” Besides, Washington’s character always has an easy out, something that the best of the noirs wouldn’t think of providing. This is particularly disappointing because the director of “Out of Time” is Carl Franklin, who made one of the best, and darkest, films of the 1990s with “One False Move.”

But I suppose it’s hard not to provide a star of Washington’s stature a lifeline, something that, in the end, tells us that he’s not such a bad guy. Still, you’d think that Washington in particular would know better. The one time he did play a villain, in “Training Day,” he earned the most prestigious award of his career — even if it did come two films too late.