Denzel feels the heat

Director Carl Franklin has teamed up once more with Denzel Washington, following their intriguing collaboration on Devil in a Blue Dress. Washington again plays an essentially good character whose flaws are significant enough to get him into trouble.

As the chief of police in a small Florida community, Matt Lee Whitlock (Washington) has an easy life. Separated from his ambitious wife, Alex (Eva Mendes), who takes her career as a homicide detective as seriously as her husband takes his fishing, Whitlock is engaged in an affair with a married woman, Ann Harrison (Sanaa Lathan), whose husband regularly beats her. When a fire rips through Harrison's house, leaving two charred corpses just days after Ann has named Whitlock as the beneficiary of an inflated life insurance policy, suspicion falls on the police chief.

The model for Whitlock is clearly Ned Racine in Body Heat, a man whose legal head is ruled by his illicit sexual dealings. Like Racine, Whitlock is caught in the tentacles of an elaborate and murderous swindle.

While the tortuous plot relies rather too heavily on minute-to-minute revelations, the cumulative tension is well maintained, and the languid, overheated air of small-town Florida is almost tangibly recreated.

Washington shifts gear adroitly from cool irresponsibility to panic, whether he is struggling to delete incriminating phone calls from the company records or engaging in a vicious fight on a collapsing balcony with a would-be killer. And Dean Cain lays the ghost of television's Superman as the vicious Harrison, whom he invests with the low cunning of a redneck Tybalt.