Deja Vu (2006)
Written: Nov 29 '06 (Updated Nov 29 '06)
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Pros: Thrilling premise, great blend of action and mind-blowing smarts.
Cons: It probably doesn't make total sense...
The Bottom Line: Denzel Washington is the man and he's on fire. Don't wait til you're out of time, go see Deja Vu!
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| flamepillar's Full Review: Deja Vu |
This would be my first trip to the theater in about three months now. I don't know what's wrong with me. But I must say, I could not have picked a better film to go to than this one right here, Deja Vu.
And I really honest-to-God thought these death-defying time-travel movies were on the way out. Needless to say, I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief right about now, 'cause I for one cannot possibly get enough of that natural high of knowing that such a thing could exist, and possibly already does. People spend so much time speculating as to what the world would be like if it did exist that I honestly wonder. I guess even a 30-year old dude like me has to have a little naivete now and then.
Deja Vu is another team effort between the great Denzel Washington (who might as well be Sir Denzel Washington at this point) and director Tony Scott. Together, they gave us Crimson Tide and more recently, Man On Fire. But wow, they're really going for the throat with this one.
If you're the kind of person who likes to watch a movie that makes you go something like, "Ohhh, so that's where that came from!" in the third act, you'll be doing a lot of that toward the end of Deja Vu. But that isn't even the half of it. You'll actually be satisfied with the answers you get. Sometimes, you'll come across such a discovery in a movie, you think "Ahh, okay, now that makes sense," but then you have kind of a "recoil" of ambivalence, like you're thinking "Big deal." about it afterwards. What happened with me, and I can't say this would be the case with anyone, but when these discoveries were revealed in Deja Vu, rather than recoiling ambivalently, I found myself thinking "Wow, if only he had known why that was there, whose blood that was, why this, why that!" Don't even get me started.
I believe a lot of that might have to do with the emotional investment that the movie demands. The film takes place in New Orleans. You might catch the banner that says "Katrina has only made us stronger!" This city's been through enough, right? And now here comes a terrorist.
The opening 10 or so minutes of the film, including that studio ad with the road and tree that gets struck by lightning (was I imagining it or did they do something deja-vu-y to that ad?) is surprisingly quiet. Behind the opening credits, we witness a half a thousand sailors and their families boarding a giant ferry boat. Aside from the sporadic line like "She's ready to go!" and the blowing of the ferry horn, there is nothing scripted. Just recurring images of people living their lives, happy, content, thankful, oblivious. Out of the blue (I actually wish they hadn't telegraphed it) a bomb goes off, and the entire ferry explodes.
The Death Star explosion is the only other time I have ever gotten choked up at an explosion in a movie before.
So cut to the aftermath. And what's really disarming about this scene is that the sun is still shining, the surroundings are still beautiful. But now we have all these bodies being dragged out of the water, people sitting on the shoreline in complete disarray. And in steps Denzel Washington. Pay attention to this shot, you might just see it again.
Following up are all the obligatory police and investigation scenes, dominated by Denzel of course. It isn't long before some weird things start happening, and I'm not talking about the guy who stopped on the bridge to watch the explosion happening. I'm talking about the burnt body that washed ashore with blast injuries five minutes before the actual explosion. I'm talking about Denzel going to this girl's house and hearing a message from himself on her answering machine. Criminy!
Deja Vu is the kind of movie that the uber-brains can speculate about all day long, but is not so overly complicated that the average person couldn't grasp a large part of exactly was going on. Some of the stuff they introduced in this film perturbed me initially because of the sheer impossibility of it, and yet as the technology was used more and more throughout the course of the movie, I found myself accepting and even understanding it.
This top-secret organization called "ATF" has a group of satellites in space that basically "see" everything in the world that's going on inside of every house and pretty much anywhere that you can imagine. The catch is that what they see is what was happening four days ago. And since this stuff is not being recorded (although you can record part of it if you want to, heh), it's basically uncontrollable. What you see is a progression of time, same as you see now, but four days ago. You can't control it or any of that.
So they start spying on this girl that got killed, looking for clues as to what might have caused it. In the meantime, we get a few layman's explanations about exactly how this whole "transcending time" thing works. At one point, Denzel points one of those laser pen things up at the image from four days ago, and the girl in the image reacts, as if she had seen it. MAN, I love this stuff!
Aside from being a complete mind-trip, Deja Vu has its fair share of action sequences as well. One involves a car chase like you've never seen before, because Denzel is following where a car went four days ago. So he has to simultaneously watch the car from the past AND watch where he is going in the present. Along the way, he walks through an open gate (which was shut four days ago, thus elaborating on how we can "move" through walls while looking at the past) and he sees an assortment of weird clues which will later make sense in typically mind-trippin' ways. Sometimes, if you're really paying attention you'll already know what's going to happen before it does, but that's the whole idea, right?
I guess you don't need me to tell about how great Denzel is, 'cause that kind of goes without saying. But he gets plenty of help from his fellow officer Val Kilmer (I wouldn't STEAL from a BABY!) as well as whiz kid Adam Goldberg and Paula Patton getting a somewhat limited amount of time to play the girl, Claire, with whom Denzel finds himself smitten. Thankfully, the film doesn't linger on such moments for too long, yet still delivers a halfway-decent love story when all is said and done.
Of course, then we have the villain played by Jim Caviezel. Caviezel made out pretty well playing what seemed to be a villain-but-you-were-never-quite-sure in The Final Cut. Here, he gets especially villainous and wordy on us toward the end, even going so far as to upstage Denzel at one point, in spite of Denzel's "KY" comeback. But that's as much of a credit to the writers as anything.
In the end, maybe Deja Vu doesn't make absolute sense, but at this point, I think it would take just as much brain work to weed out the "mistakes" as it would to rationalize the potential reality of the film.
I don't even know what else to say besides that I cannot wait for this DVD to come out! In what has otherwise been a pretty unmotivating year for movies, Deja Vu has rekindled my desire to go to the movies again, much to the chagrin of anyone to whom I owe money. Blah! Just go see this one!
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Action Movie
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
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flamepillar
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Member: Timothy Bishop
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