Deja Vu Is Just That
God Bless Movie Trailer Makers. I honestly believe that. Sometimes, the best thing in the movie you're about to see is the trailers. And they've gotten to be really good, so good that they can turn a movie you'd never pay for into an anticipated event. And then there's the trailer that makes you think you're about to enter a strange new world, only to find out that it's nothing more mysterious than what's been seen before a thousand times over.
Deja Vu was packaged as a psychological thriller with action and suspense. The problem is that it cheated in every sense of the term. It cheats you into seeing the movie. It cheats its characters into being 2-dimensional. And then it cheats itself into being a confounded mess of confusion. It starts with a terrorist act, a New Orleans ferry is blown up, hundreds injured and killed. Enter Denzel Washington as an ATF agent that realizes that things aren't as they're supposed to be when he has his fingerprints in a victim's house long before he ever stepped foot inside. His voice is on her answering machine. And now some covert agency wants his help. ***SUPER SPOILERS FROM HERE ON*** This agency harnesses a screen that can look four days into the past. They need to know what to look for since they can't TIVO time for some reason.
From here is where things get murky. And you know that where there's a window into the past, there's got to be a door. And where there's time travel, there's paradoxes that make little sense. Unfortunately, the ones in this movie doesn't even follow it's own rules. By the time we get to the end, there are major lapses of plausibility that conclude in a cute way, but one that makes little sense.
This is not a step forward for Washington, even though he's usually in good hand with Tony Scott. The problem is that he tries too hard to make the situation look plausible in a movie that dodges plausibility like the draft. Val Kilmer seems to find the right note here playing the head of the small unit. He's in on the joke and takes the seriousness of the situation with a grain of salt. And then there's Jim Caviezel who again is overacting like he knows what he's doing. Someone needs to tell him to slow down and take it easy or he'll bust a vain or two.
This is a step back by director Tony Scott, who has redefined his technique in Man on Fire and Domino and now has gone back to Bruckhiemer-friendly one-dimensional. But then again, Jerry Bruckhiemer isn't so much into innovation as he is into what is tested and true. But here's something that bothers me about Deja Vu. The film marginalizes terrorism the same way that movies did before 9/11, taking away the ominous undertones for a kind of thrill-seeking event. It overcompensates for the joyous abandon into action with a shrug to the victims that it creates. When we marginalize acts of violence such as a ferry explosion, aren't we only putting ourselves in a state of apathy to the aftermath?
All in all, Deja Vu is exactly the title represents; something we've seen before. But that's the problem. Movies need to give you something different in order to make the experience unique. But in a Hollywood that would be more than happy making the same movie over and over again, I get the feeling we'll be reeling from this movie over the next twelve Jerry Bruckheimer productions.