Back Rowe Reviews
Real Time Movie Reviews from the Back Row of a Theater

Deja Vu (PG-13)

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Directed by: Tony Scott
Starring: Denzel Washington
November 2006

“The Feeling That You’ve Seen This Plot Before”


In 2001, the Oscar for Best Actor went to Denzel Washington for his portrayal of a crooked cop in Training Day. With an Oscar in one hand and an ever-growing list of box-office hits in the other, one wonders why Denzel settled for the diverting, yet middling love story, Déjà Vu, which co-stars Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel and the comely Paula Patton (Hitch).

The movie opens with a domestic terrorist attack on a ferryboat in a New Orleans harbor (hasn’t the city already suffered enough?). Detail-retentive ATF agent, Doug Carlin (Washington), responds to the disaster and takes on the challenge of solving the mystery surrounding the death of Claire (Patton), a young, attractive woman who washed up onshore two hours before the bombing with burn marks and chemical traces consistent with the other ferryboat victims. A visit to Claire’s house reveals even more time incongruities: Having never met Claire, Doug is startled when he plays back a voicemail message he left on Claire’s answer machine. Doug also discovers a cryptic admonition spelled out in alphabet magnets on Claire’s refrigerator door, “U can save her.”

The story takes a sci-fi twist when Agent Pryzwarra (Kilmer) invites Doug to join his special team of techno-geeks, who employ state-of-the-art technology to play back events from the recent past. At first, Doug is awed by the hi-tech equipment, but ongoing timeline discrepancies drive him toward disturbing revelations about Claire, whom he’s rapidly falling in love with, and his Geek Squad cronies.

The main bane of most time travel stories is a flawed or confusing paradox, and Déjà Vu, unfortunately, suffers the effects of this narrative nemesis. This Jerry Bruckheimer produced, Tony Scott directed film had all the potential to be a first-rate thriller, but it suffers from scientific inconsistencies and plot holes big enough to drive an ambulance through. From a dramatic standpoint, the movie’s elegant wrap-up is effective and maybe even a tad heartwarming, but the film leaves its audience with the nagging feeling that they’ve fallen victim to cinematic prestidigitation. Even with the Temporal Mechanics for Dummies seminar at the movie’s midpoint, the convoluted plot—which plays fast and loose with the very theories it espouses—fails to deliver the stand-and-applaud climax the writers were clearly anticipating.

The only groundbreaking concept in the movie is the scene where Doug tracks the killer to his hideout with the help of a goggle rig that transmits images from four days earlier, before the bombing took place. The high-speed pursuit—where Doug keeps one eye on the past and one eye on the road—is, arguably, the most memorable sequence in the film, but it’s all so much visual Teflon…hollow thrills that are quickly forgotten once the movie fades to black.

Washington does his usual good job as the unimpeachable agent and Caviezel plays an adequate cold-blooded killer, but both characters are severely underserved, particularly Caviezel’s Oerstadt. We witness Oerstadt’s bloodletting, but we don’t know anything about him or what motivates him to commit such heinous acts. Oerstadt, a washed-out military man, does issue one spine-tingling line however, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot.” As for the other actors, Kilmer is mere set dressing and Patton does solid work in a limited role.

Déjà Vu would have been a runaway success if not for the muddy cause and effect plot which bogs down a story that otherwise would have been immensely enjoyable. It’s just too bad the writers couldn’t use the movie’s technology to go back in time and fix some of their mistakes…and fix some of their mistakes.

Rating: 2 1/2