Deja Vu

Directed by Tony Scott, Deja Vu opens with a deadly explosion aboard a New Orleans ferry that leaves hundreds dead, with the ensuing investigation catching the interest of brilliant ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington). After immediately spotting clues overlooked by his peers, Doug catches the attention of a mysterious fed named Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) and soon finds himself caught up in a time-bending probe of the tragedy. Working from Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio’s screenplay, Scott and cinematographer Paul Cameron have infused Deja Vu with precisely the sort of slick sensibility that one has come to expect from a Jerry Bruckheimer production. To their credit, both Scott and Bruckheimer have resisted the temptation to pepper the admittedly talky screenplay with a series of needless action sequences – which ensures that such moments can’t help but come off as engrossing and genuinely exciting when they do arrive. The eclectic supporting cast, consisting of such familiar faces as Adam Goldberg, Matt Craven, and Bruce Greenwood, plays a substantial part in the film’s success, though there’s little doubt that most of the picture’s characters are straight out of the Bruckheimer playbook (eg Goldberg’s wisecracking tech whiz is a perfect example of this). Washington delivers as expectedly charismatic a performance as one might’ve expected, while Jim Caviezel makes for an appropriately sinister villain. The film’s time-traveling elements, which appear to be, on first glance, entirely nonsensical, seem to hold up fairly well to scrutiny, with the end result an entirely entertaining piece of escapist fare – and yet there’s no denying that it would’ve been better served with a much shorter running time (at 128 minutes, the film is at least a half hour longer than it needs to be).

*** out of ****

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