


As part of his investigation, Carlin discovers the body of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), an apparent victim of the bombing. Unfortunately, 'Deja Vu' falls into the second of those two traps, basing its story a "top secret" defense technology so ridiculous that it it completely undermines this otherwise routine thriller.ĭenzel Washington stars as Doug Carlin, an ATF agent assigned to investigate a terrorist attack on a New Orleans ferry that has left over 500 people dead. But if you go too far in the other direction and build outlandish technological concepts into your story, you run the risk of straining your credibility, and veering into bad science fiction territory. If you don't use the latest cutting-edge gadgets and gizmos to propel your story, you run the risk of making your film feel dated before it even hits theaters. Like all time-travel films, there's a jarring, nonsensical moment when the altered past has to meet the join of the unaltered present, but it's all carried off with a mad and silly energy, with muscular direction from Scott and cut together with frenetic fizz by editors Jason Hellman and Chris Lebenzon.Integrating technology into a modern-day thriller is often tricky business. He actually smashes into people while he is doing this, his mighty Hummer crushing their paltry civilian automobiles! Tony Scott duly exploits the opportunity to show cars crashing innocent people must have been grievously hurt, surely? But does Washington worry? Heavens, no! He shares the director's own magnificent indifference.
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The best bits come when Washington is still in the here and now, zooming merrily along in a Humvee using a special portable virtual-reality scanner clamped to one eye to track the killer's past movements, driving along this same highway four days previously. As in Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate, the film paradoxically feels more comfortable with a white American in the terrorist-villain role, rather than an alienated Arab or Muslim: an approach that avoids ethnic offence and even appears daringly liberal, but actually implies that only Americans are equal to the task of successfully attacking other Americans. We find out early on that the terrorist culprit is an American, played by Jim Caviezel, an ultra-patriot extremist nut. After an awful, plasma-screen-smashing row about the ethics of the whole business, the scientists are persuaded to let Washington hunch into their special pod, resembling the nosecone of Apollo 9, in which he can travel back in time, on a desperate mission to prevent the bombing and get jiggy with Claire in her pre-corpse state.
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Their invention is like one of those Sky+ gizmos that allows you to "freeze" live TV sports events while you make a cup of tea, and then lets you resume watching on a time-delay. Who was she? How did she fit in? Carlin is astonished to find that a top-secret team of funky boffins can help him: using Einsteinian know-how to bend time and watch events unfolding anywhere in the world, four days ago. Washington conceives for the spiffing stiff what I have to say is an unwholesome and necrophiliac tendresse. She is a drop dead gorgeous gal who has dropped dead. Washington's heart is melted by discovering the body of a beautiful woman called Claire (Paula Patton) who appears to have been separately killed by the terrorist before the bombing took place.
