The best thing that can be said about DEJA VU is that it pumped some much needed revenue into New Orleans and its environs. The second best thing that can be said about this otherwise benighted exercise is that by filming a few scenes in the ravaged Ninth Ward of that city, the devastation that Katrina caused there is brought home in a potent, immediate fashion. It’s not just the houses scattered like so many toys carelessly flung away by a disinterested child, it’s also the fine veil of mold that encrusts everything. From there, the list of good things to be found drops precipitously from the wry delights of Adam Goldberg’s uber-nerd right down to direction by Tony Scott that seems to be moving in a time/space continuum separate from the film itself. One that flows in very, very slow motion.
The time is now, sort of, and the action begins with a riverboat full of happy people, schoolchildren and enlisted men mostly, being blows to smithereens. The explosion is soon deemed to be the work of terrorists of some sort and so crack FBI agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington), accent on the last syllable, is brought in to investigate. His ability to see both the big picture and the small details with one glance impresses the heck out of a special agent (Val Kilmer at his most vanilla) brought in from Washington to head up his own investigation, and Doug soon finds himself in a super-tech command center set up in makeshift fashion on the banks of the Mississippi. He’s told that it’s a super-secret satellite link station, one that can zero in with amazing detail on any location and from multiple angles. The catch is that it can only be seen once. Doug is there to look for anything hinky as the local scenes unfold on command center’s very big screen. But Doug, being a man with superior powers of observation, notices things, such as the view presented not taking place in real time, or at least not his time. Instead, it’s four days and six hours ago, which the scientists explain away as having to do with processing delays due to the huge amount of information being fed to them. Of course it’s more complicated than that.
Doug has the idea to watch not the crime scene before it becomes one, but rather Claire (Paula Patton) the lovely young woman whose body will wash up on shore, burned like the other bombing victims, but in a spot where the tide couldn’t have taken it if she’d been on the river boat. He’s convinced that she, or someone she will be in contact with, is the key to solving the crime, perhaps because she tried to call him shortly before her death even though they had never met. Perhaps it was the odd message spelled out on her refrigerator telling him that he could save her. Along the way, naturally, Doug falls for the comely soon-to-be murder victim as he struggles with the laws of physics and the reality of being able to look back in time and not be able to do change anything that he sees.
The audience is treated to a lucid explanation of the science behind the premise, enough to make it all seem plausible and, from a plotting point of view, providing a truly nifty point of tension for our hero. There is also a nice sequence that exploits the visual possibilities of the premise in which Doug moves around in the present while seeing the recent past as his reality courtesy of a suitably clunky goggle pack. That’s handled deftly. As are the sprinkling of clues that fill in the back story of separate timestreams on a collision course. Alas, a sprightly pace and some crisp directorial moves would have rendered this into a fun popcorn flick instead of the lethargic exercise that it becomes. Certainly Washington can’t be faulted. As usual, he gives his all as the cop on a mission to bend the laws of physics to his will. As the damsel in distress, Patton is fine within the parameters set for her by the script, as in, look good while being menaced. She manages to salvage some grit out of the underwritten part. Jim Caviezel as the wacko of the piece plays it more catatonic than creepy, but registers as someone to whom a wide berth should be given.
Fans of Washington and/or the endless possibilities to be explored in the more esoteric parts physics might find enough here to warrant the investment of 128 minutes. It’s a mighty big might, though.
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