Time Lapse

Is "Déjà Vu" a trick of the mind?  Let's hope so.  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Denzel Washington continues his track record of consecutive days without emoting.

The Downside: Most movie theater seats aren't that easy to nap in.

    A year ago when I wrote my review of Domino, I said something to the effect that it might be time to put Tony Scott on Ritalin.  What I'd like to know- is it too late to take that back?  Okay, there are some people who may think Scott's movies have gotten a little loopy since Spy Game, and there are those who just don't like him at all, but even as He Who is the Younger Brother of Ridley began ladling on the visual trickery with Man on Fire (under-cranked frames, seven-second edits, relentless subtitles), the result may have been a mess, but was never boring.

    Déjà Vu, on the other hand, is a head-shaking, soul-rattling bore.  Yeah, sure, it is slick, but it's slick in that Michael Bay sort of way- the kind of gloss any half-competent technician who was weaned on music videos could give a movie.  And that's the problem- save for the presence of Denzel Washington, who after two previously successful outings with Scott must have felt some degree of professional loyalty, there is nothing in or about Déjà Vu that could set it apart from Con Air or Bad Company or about a dozen other forgettable "thrillers" in the Jerry Bruckheimer library.  When this happens to just about any other director, it's par for the course.  When it happens to Tony Scott, the result is surprisingly depressive.  I know not everyone is a fan, and it's your personal intuition whether you think Scott's creative core is real and vibrant or plastic and phony, but either way in Déjà Vu that core's been scooped out like so much pumpkin goop before Halloween.

    Déjà Vu couldn't be a bona fide Bruckheimer movie if it didn't start with things blowing up, and in this case that thing is a New Orleans ferry that we see in the opening credits montage as it is packed to the rails with on-leave Navy soldiers, school children, and pleasant-looking grandparents (what, no kittens?).  Investigating the bombing is ATF agent Doug Carlin, a typically personality unburdened Denzel Washington Tough Guy whose idea of comic relief is to occasionally flash dental work that must be worth a semester or two at Harvard.  The X-Files nostalgia sets in when Carlin stumbles across a nerdish government surveillance program which apparently is using large generators and mood lighting to "bend time on itself" and get a glimpse of the way things were, at least in the narrow window of four days ago.

    It it wasn't already that Déjà Vu was coming out of the gate without any spark, this is double the blunder, double the d'oh.  Think about it, a massive government project with the ability to manipulate time and space, and the best we can get is having it populated by central casting techno-geeks who act and breathe like the love child of Steve Jobs and The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy?  These are folks who make Washington's Man of Two Facial Expressions hero seem well groomed and textured.

    Garish lighting and restless camera aside, the first half of the movie is dead, limp weight, imbued with all the fun and excitement you can imagine coming from watching people stare at video monitors... at least except when the movie needs to switch out of its Star Trek-y quantum double-speak about "alternate realities" in time for pop culture references that are so 1992.  By the time it gets something to happen, namely pitting Washington against New Orleans traffic in a Mad Max Hummer while wearing a retro-fitted Captain Video helmet (as zany as this sounds, it isn't nearly as fun as you'd expect), the air's already been let out of the balloon and Déjà Vu, ironically already a movie about futile attempts to undermine a concrete fate, is set upon a course that includes all the expected dodges and changeups (to be completely fair, though, the movie doesn't go as far as to cheat), but does so in such a lock-step pattern that it doesn't take a computer the size of a suburban Wal-Mart to surmise what is going to happen next.  Movies like this require a love interest, or at least a pleasant enough form for the hero to make long dreamy gazes at, and in this case there's Claire (Paula Patton), a half-Creole waif whose body is found floating amongst the wreckage of the ferry, which should seem fairly open and shut until Carlin sees a message reading "U Can Save Her" scrawled in magnetic letters on the woman's refrigerator.

    It would be redundant to say this angle of Déjà Vu (can he save the woman before she dies- again?) isn't well developed because nothing is well developed here.  I mean, how thrilling has your time travel story become when the question of whether time can be altered to save countless lives doesn't impact as much as others such as whether or not you let the cat out and if you can get a refill of soda on your way out of the theater?  To inject a bit of nutzo class, James Caviezel, the Man Who Was Jesus, does get thrown into the mix as a McVeigh-style, Jefferson-quoting, jingoistic wonk job, but it is more a daffy touch- so 1995.

    It isn't as if this is the first time Tony Scott has made a movie this ineffectual- the early 90s between Beverly Hills Cop II and The Last Boy Scout were a pure slumming season, but if his milieu in the last five years, post more sobering classics like True Romance and Crimson Tide, have resembled over-engineered widget contraptions about to burst at their own seams, at least they were as interesting as failures as they were as successes.  I revisited Domino a few months ago and came away a little more on its wavelength, which is something I think it takes to dig the crazed half of Tony Scott.  I can't picture a scenario of doing the same with Déjà Vu, mostly because its wafer-thin delivery leaves little to be misunderstood or re-evaluated.  In contrast, this weekend has seen scores of nasty reviews for a movie called The Fountain, a brilliant rumination on the mysteries behind life and death.  The Fountain's been called "pretentious," "showy," and some have gone as far to charge that it isn't about as much as it pretends.  My only hope is that those critics had to walk into a screening of Déjà Vu after writing those words- and are in the process of penning Darren Aronofsky some very sincere apology letters.  C-

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