Déjà Vu
The colors pop and the surround sound whooshes in a Tony Scott movie. He packs the frame with action, he slows it down, he speeds it up and he cuts, cuts, cuts with unrelenting ferocity. The content is almost immaterial; no matter what, he will direct the hell out of it. Call him soulless, but he knows how to make immersive, kinetic cinema. He pours his considerable gifts for entertaining schlock into “Déjà Vu,” which injects time travel into law enforcement with opulent preposterousness. The title, and the marketing campaign, suggest that the movie will dramatize that eerie tingle you feel when something seems to have happened to you before. It doesn’t. At all. Either the title represents a willful act of misdirection, or the filmmakers settled on it because “Timecop” was taken.
Denzel Washington stars as a New Orleans ATF agent with zero private life. He’s a loner, we’re told, but we never find out why; he seems well-adjusted enough. Regardless, I appreciate a thriller that doesn’t weigh its characters down with banal psychological baggage. Washington doesn’t need it; his earthy skepticism and swaggering physical presence make him the perfect choice to ride in the front car of this roller coaster. With Scott behind the camera, he can make the act of answering a cell phone seem heroic and macho. And he’s forever applying common sense to problems that defy all logic. Investigating a ferry explosion that killed 543 people, Washington is brought into a secret FBI lab equipped with, well, a time machine. Its operators, including Val Kilmer and Adam Goldberg, can observe everything that happened four days in the past within a certain geographic area. And they can send physical objects into the past, although no one has experimented with that too much. There’s a welcome breeziness to the dialogue as the pseudo-science behind the time-travel gambit is explained, as if Scott doesn’t expect you to take it seriously. And the geographical limitations of the time-warp surveillance are spectacularly arbitrary. Our dogged heroes zero in on the bombing suspect when he starts to drive out of range. Well, um, er, there is a mobile device that can expand the range, Washington is told. Cut to: Washington in a Hummer, trying to chase a guy who was on the same road four days ago, leaving behind him a wake of destruction. Of course it’s hard to gaze into the past and drive at the same time, but his disregard for collateral damage on the roadways is amazing. Later, he will tell someone, “You’ll only be safe with me,” and the next shot will show him careening through an intersection, causing yet another accident.
“Déjà Vu,” then, has plentiful humor, both intentional and unintentional. I also got a kick out of its shamelessness. Scott mercilessly exploits the wounds of Hurricane Katrina — even staging a throwaway action sequence in the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. And, with the ferry bombing, he inflicts spectacular new carnage on the Crescent City. Then, he has the chutzpah to end the movie with these solemn words: “This film is dedicated to the strength and spirit of the people of New Orleans.” If “Déjà Vu” were capable of being taken seriously at all, such a dedication might be offensive, but this movie is a hoot and a holler.