Review: Deja Vu -- Ryan's Take

Without any prior knowledge of the film, a savvy moviegoer might guess that Deja Vu is about time travel from the opening sequence, which provides one of those attention-grabbing visuals that can serve as a tether-pole around which to swing lots of different time lines. The visual is a New Orleans river ferry filled to capacity with uniformed sailors and their families. They are either returning from duty or having a celebratory twirl around the river before heading out -- I can't remember which. But in the midst of their revelry, no one notices a creepy Tim McVeigh clone, played adequately by Jim Caviezel, who parks a Range Rover laden with explosives on the boat and then splits. The cosmic ripple in this otherwise terrestrial act of terrorism comes when the investigator assigned to the case, Denzel Washington, finds after arriving on scene that one of the victims attempted to contact him by phone hours earlier. It's a nice setup, but unfortunately director Tony Scott has no rabbits to pull out of his famous red ballcap this time.

If you pair up Scott with a good screenplay, watch out. Through his collaborations with Shane Black, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Harrison, we know that he has no interest in ruining a good thing once it lands in his lap. But without the grounding a good script provides, Scott invariably goes off on an aimless visual tear, as with films like Domino and Man on Fire, or pours gallons of energy into badly conceived tech-fantasy films like Enemy of the State. He also grabs at opportunities to nurse his own strange compulsions, like the need to emasculate sophisticated machinery -- to bust it down to size. In Top Gun, a jet fighter is juxtaposed against a motorcycle, to show that both are just something you throw a leg over and kickstart. Days of Thunder has a scene where the dueling drivers abandon their fancy stock cars and hop into civilian cars to go race down the highway. In Deja Vu, Denzel does everything short of give a wedgie to a nerd who tries to explain to him the mechanics of a time machine.

There's nothing more frustrating in a time travel film than to have the hero show little to no interest in the particulars. If you stumbled upon time travel -- the greatest discovery in the history of history -- would you care about something so pedestrian as using it for crime-solving purposes? To back up a bit, the techno-babble hook in this film is that some computer nerds (apparently kept on retainer by the New Orleans Police Department) have created a souped-up version of Google Earth that can access four day-old satellite imagery of any event, from any angle, presumably by bouncing it off a star millions of miles away. Full-spectrum video playback is available for anything that happened within a certain radius of their headquarters, but they can only tap into the feed, not manipulate it. There is no capability to stop, pause, fast-forward or rewind. With me so far? This sets up the film's signature scene, in which Denzel straps on time-goggles, jumps into a vehicle, and 'chases' another vehicle four days in the past.

Denzel also soon discovers that flashing a laser pointer at the video playback screen causes the people inside it to respond. Turns out that it's possible to jump directly into the four-day old video screen -- a detail the nerds knew about but chose not to tell anyone. Our hero is soon stuffing himself inside a refrigerator-sized time pod that the nerds have on stand-by, even though they insist it could never work, and hurling himself back to the day of the terrorist attack. He is especially motivated because he is taken with Claire (Paula Patton), a woman half his age who is living out her life in the four-day old video screen but who dies in the ferry blast in the current timeline. It was she who contacted him the morning before the explosion. Once Denzel pods his way back to the four-day old timeline, he must stop Jim Caviezel's terrorist plot and rescue Claire and the other victims of the attack before it happens.

The bottom line is that there's nothing especially likeable about the hero in this film, nor do we really care if he accomplishes his mission of helping a lot of people cheat death by ripping up the carpet of space-time. The film creates too many suspension of disbelief hoops for an intelligent audience to jump through, and gives back next to nothing in terms of narrative payoff. The plot may technically tie up all of its loose ends, if you accept the internal logic, but that doesn't make its half-baked time travel exposition scenes any more plausible or any more enjoyable to sit through. (This is the first movie I've seen where people explain Einstein-Rosen bridges by yelling at each other) The film leaves you with a sneaking suspicion that if you're one of the people who emerge from the theater scratching your head over the lack of logic, then the joke is on you because the intended audience wasn't you in the first place -- it was those goo-goo eyed Denzel Fan Club ladies in the first row who only want to see their man save the girl, in any timeline.