>>REVIEW
DÉJÀ VU
STARRING Denzel Washington, Paula Patton and Val Kilmer
DIRECTED BY Tony Scott
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Déjà Vu is appropriately titled. About halfway through the film, audiences might be asking themselves if they have seen it before. Denzel Washington plays the good-natured, wisecracking everyman. Tony Scott does his best to induce epileptic fits with over-the-top roaming camera and nearly triple-digit edits per minute. It’s a murder mystery with a twist. Yup, this is familiar. And yet, like déjà vu, it’s an intangible familiarity, so if you are willing to go along for the ride, it is tangibly entertaining.
A warning for those who proceed: to talk about the movie properly, there will be spoilers. If you saw the trailer and were curious, or if you, like me, are a fan of Scott’s high-octane approach, just go see the damn thing. If you’re still curious, read on.
The premise is complex. In a post-Katrina New Orleans, a terrorist attack on a Mississippi ferry unleashes an explosion that kills hundreds. ATF agent Doug Carlin (Washington) is on the case and before long he realizes there is more to the crime than he thought. That go-to attitude encourages a federal agent (Val Kilmer) to invite Carlin to a top-secret government project. An accidental quantum physics experiment has opened a wormhole, allowing the feds to look four days into the past to collect evidence to solve big crimes. Carlin is suitably dumbfounded. To be honest, some of the audience was, too. Still with me?
What unfolds next is like a combination of Back to the Future and Enemy of the State – a world of time-travel surveillance where a group of investigators are in a race against time to witness a crime that has already happened. Admittedly, if there is a filmmaker who is going to make good on such a high-concept premise, it’s Scott.
While his brother Ridley has been chumming with Oscar bait like Gladiator, Tony has made populist action extravaganzas like Top Gun and True Romance, really only misstepping with the bloated Domino in 2005. With Déjà Vu he’s clearly back on track. The cast is beefed up with such well-known character actors as Bruce Greenwood, James Caviezel and Adam Goldberg. The film is slick and for the most part, even the unbelievable premise isn’t too hard to swallow.
When you consider that most of the screen-time features a group of five people watching a TV linked to the past, the tension is surprisingly palpable. There are only two problems with Déjà Vu. At two hours and eight minutes, it is a little long and even though the whole affair seems destined for a tragic ending, the winking, upbeat dénouement feels false and tacked on.
That, however, doesn’t change the fact that Déjà Vu is well acted, tightly paced and entertaining escapism, even if you do have the feeling that you have seen some of it before. |
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