THE HEAT IS ON DENZEL.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

WE KNOW THAT Denzel Washington's easygoing, recently divorced, Florida key police chief is in for a mess of trouble when he shows a wacky colleague the substantial amount of narcotics evidence money he's holding for the feds in his little station-house safe.

We know the form that trouble will come in when the sultry married woman he's been bedding takes him along on an unusual weekend visit to her doctor's office - where they both are informed she has almost inoperable cancer.

One burned bungalow with two scorched-beyond-easy-identification corpses later, and trouble for the compromised cop has definitely come home to roost. Then the feds call; they want that evidence money. Now. And by this time, our tarnished protagonist has no idea where that loot, like the lady he's been seeing, could possibly be.

Oh, and those arson deaths? Dade County Sheriff's is taking over the investigation. And their lead detective? One very stressed-out local gent's angry ex.

Yes, Denzel Washington's Matt Lee Whitlock has a lot to cope with in ``Out of Time''; and as the title of this ridiculously (though not too cleverly) overplotted sunstroke noir tells us, he doesn't have long to figure out just how he's been played, let alone set things right.

Though the script, by first-time screenwriter Dave Collard (watch out; his only previous listed credit is for the TV cartoon ``Family Guy''), starts out a leisurely enough, even sultry pace, once all of the plot gizmos start whirring, the sudden jeopardies and split-second saves pile up so deliriously it almost makes you forget that every single twist is exactly what you'd expected it would be an hour earlier.

Give director Carl Franklin - who made a much better, sex-charged mystery, ``Devil in a Blue Dress,'' with Washington before he started churning out potboilers like ``One True Thing'' and last year's ``High Crimes'' - credit for juggling this narrative overload with a sometimes impressive sense of organization. Especially when large numbers of suspicious people crowd into Banyan Key's glass-walled, nowhere-to-hide cop shop, Franklin can whip up a nail-biting high time out of the suspense possibilities of cramped space.

But while the story's many manipulations can't help but put us on edge, there is very little in the way of exciting action (a cliffhanger off a Miami hotel balcony is either ineptly or realistically staged - whichever is the case, it makes you giggle when it shouldn't).

The actors try to take the material seriously. Washington excels at projecting cool while indicating that his guts are flooding with acid. Sanaa Lathan, until now an adequate place-holder in buppie comedies (``The Best Man,'' ``Brown Sugar'') and jockette romances (``Love and Basketball''), makes a memorable femme fatale out of the enticingly pronounced Ann Merai Harrison. And ubiquitous Gal We Like This Year Eva Mendes gets the balance right between solid police pro and fed-up (but still with feelings) ex-wife Alex Diaz Whitlock.

``Out of Time's'' one true find, however, is character actor John Billingsley. He plays the wacky colleague, Chae, mentioned at the top of this review. The guy's some kind of technician, and Billingsley is given the usual nerd glasses and flyaway hairdo Hollywood associates with such. But Billingsley invests Chae with a partying heart and surrealist sense of subversiveness that ultimately turn the character into the only person Matt can trust - and since he's the least reliable flake in the department, he's about the only character from the movie whose behavior will genuinely surprise anyone.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

OUT OF TIME - Two and one half stars

(PG-13: sex, violence, language)

Starring: Denzel Washington, Eva Mendes, Sanaa Lathan, Dean Cain, John Billingsley.

Director: Carl Franklin.

Running time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Ticking-clock sex thriller gets more ludicrous with each passing second, but the orchestration of some of this baroquely coincidental cat-and-mousing is occasionally impressive.

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Denzel Washington plays a Florida police chief under suspicion of murder in ``Out of Time.''