Jack Foley (George Clooney) is a bank robber who has a bad habit of spending time behind bars before he can spend his ill-gotten gains. While in the Glades correctional facility near Miami, Foley piggybacks on an escape attempt with the assistance of his partner in crime on the outside, Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames). Their scheme goes well until a chance encounter with U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) leaves Jack and Buddy with no choice but to take her hostage. Foley is smitten with the headstrong Sisco, and her tendency to go for "bad boys" complicates their impossible attraction of cop and crook. Sisco follows Foley and Buddy from Miami to Detroit, where they're planning a home invasion with a big payoff, thanks to businessman and fellow inmate Richard Ripley (Albert Brooks). An unexpected partner emerges in the robbery, Maurice "Snoopy" Miller (Don Cheadle), a fellow inmate with a sadistic streak. Will Snoopy's involvement jeopardize the score? Will Sisco catch Jack and bring him in? More importantly, does she even want to bring him in?Soderbergh, working with screenwriter Scott Frank (who had earlier adapted Leonard's Get Shorty and would later work on Karen Sisco, a TV spin-off about Jennifer Lopez's character) wisely eschewed with the original draft's linear narrative. Soderbergh tends to gravitate towards overlapping flashbacks, flash-forwards, and misleading bridges between the two, so Out of Sight benefits from the shift (originally done practically in order to introduce Karen Sisco earlier in the story), where information is slowly doled out as time moves backwards and forwards, finally catching the audience up on the whole story three-quarters of the way in.
I remembered to some degree about having issues with the "love scene" on first viewing: Soderbergh inter-cuts a bar scene between Sisco and Foley with future scenes of the mutual seduction in her hotel room, overlapping dialogue into the flash-forwards. Coming back to the film, it bothered me less, along with Soderbergh's use of freeze frames at strategic points in the film, often used to pause on the situation at hand, giving the audience a moment to consider what they've just seen.
Soderbergh also uses another technique he'd visit again in the future: color coding of sections in the film. Scenes in a penitentiary out west are punctuated by bright yellow jumpsuits, while the Glades correctional facility uniforms are more subdued. Miami light sources are always blown out, and the Detroit section of the film is filtered with a steely blue (except for Ripley's house, which stands out in opulence from the economically drained downtown Maurice Miller claims to run). Soderbergh used a variation in The Underneath and would separate Traffic visually and thematically two years later.
So much of Out of Sight is immediately recognizable, regardless of the length of time that passed between the first viewing and the most recent. Even with the period of time away from the film, Soderbergh and Frank's story is so well constructed that it's easy to feel as though you're visiting an old friend, reminiscing about oft-repeated stories. At the same time, the film is fresh, clever, and funnier than I remembered.
People tend to take George Clooney's status as a leading man for granted now, but when Out of Sight was released, he was very much on the "bubble" as actors go. He'd been in the spotlight on ER, but major film roles were limited to One Fine Day, The Peacemaker, and the disastrous Batman & Robin. From Dusk Til Dawn had hinted to geeks that Clooney could be more than the "Most handsome man in America," but Out of Sight paved the way for more interesting roles in Three Kings, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Ocean's Eleven (re-teaming with Soderbergh).
Likewise, Jennifer Lopez was probably never better than as Karen Sisco, despite the marquee role in Selena and the lurid femme fatale in Oliver Stone's U-Turn. Ving Rhames has a refreshing sense of concern as Buddy, a character that is both unflinchingly loyal yet morally conflicted about his life (a running subplot in the film involves Buddy's need to call his born-again sister to confess, often before committing a crime). Don Cheadle's Snoopy Miller is a real surprise - both comical and menacing without one compromising the other, and Albert Brooks takes a character he could play in his sleep and imbues Richard Ripley with a truly vicious streak on the outside he doesn't have in prison. He's an opportunist that you don't feel sympathy for, even in light of what happens (and almost happens) during his home invasion.
I'd forgotten about the parade of recognizable faces in the film - Luis Guzman as an escapee, Catherine Keener as Foley's ex-wife, Steve Zahn as the perpetually stoned car thief that talks too much, Dennis Farina as Karen's father, Isiah Washington as Snoopy's partner in crime, and Nancy Allen* as Ripley's housekeeper / girlfriend.
There's a small stroke of genius in carrying over Michael Keaton as Ray Nicolette, creating a bridge between the worlds of Jackie Brown (released the year before) and Out of Sight. Add to that a small, uncredited cameo at the end of the film by another actor who played a different character in Jackie Brown, and the intertextual elements between Tarantino's and Soderbergh's films is worth considering beyond the individual stories.
Out of Sight is, after all these years, still a fresh breath of air when so many films of the "new wave" 90s cinema seems dated and stale. It is an easy movie to overlook, to forget, but it refuses to go quietly into that good night. Believe me, that's a good thing. Revisit the film for yourself; you'll be pleasantly surprised.
* By coincidence, I somehow chose two films to watch back-to-back that feature Nancy Allen in small roles with The Last Detail and Out of Sight.
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