Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a positive look at Tony Scott's follow-up to DOMINO, a movie damn near everyone seem to hate except for me. Sure it was overboard, but I guess I just like Scott's insanity, however I am glad to hear he's toned it down a bit. Story over style. I'm looking forward to this one.
Déjà Vu is the newest film from Tony Scott, the director of Top Gun, True Romance, Spy Game, and most recently Domino. Cast in the lead role is Denzel Washington, who collaborated with Scott on the revenge tale, Man on Fire. Man on Fire’s story is as basic and primitive as you can get. A troubled killer-for-hire goes on a killing spree to find the murderers of the only person who made him feel less like a killer and more like a human being. It is a flawed film to say the least, but still has redeemable qualities. What muddles Fire, Domino, and a few others of Scott’s, is his reliance on lightning quick edits and ‘poetic’ cut-ins. With Déjà vu, he put those methods that seem to stem from his days with Enemy of the State, in his pocket and decided to use clear images and precise cuts to tell a messy, all over the place story about time travel. It is actually quite ironic that in ditching these messy methods, he picked such a technically complex story to follow the critical and commercial failure of Domino. While Déjà vu isn’t perfect, the 180-degree switch really worked. I am a huge skeptic when it comes to time travel stories. It is so easy to make the story illogical and it seems so damn hard to make it all make sense. I’m sure if I rewatch it, I can probably find some errors in logic, but upon the first viewing, there didn’t seem to be any. The rest has a few spoilers but they are very light. From the trailer you already know a boat was bombed and many people died. If you strip away the time-travel aspect, all it really boils down to is a straight mystery to find the bomber. An ATF agent (Washington) is called in to investigate the bombing. He isn’t in charge of the investigation, his only objective is to prove it was in fact a bombing and find out what components were used. I really enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t ‘in-charge’ of the entire investigation. He is a federal agent who specializes in bombs and he came in with the intention of doing his job and getting out. Then a girl’s charred body floats up on the shore and forensics determines that she died minutes prior to the explosion. The agent’s ears perk up and from there the mystery is in place. Turns out that he and the FBI are not the only people investigating this tragedy. There is a group of technicians led by Val Kilmer who are using brand new technology to find the bomber. It involves monitoring past events. That is all I will say. It goes into depth about how all of this is done and trust me if you’re a skeptic like me, you will buy the logic. What exactly this new technology does and more importantly the ethical ramifications of man becoming more ‘godlike’ is the primary focus of this actioner. It is an action film with brains. It isn’t perfect. Jim Caviezel isn’t given enough room to add any depth to the villain and the technicians are geeky stereotypes that have crowded the high-tech rooms of Hollywood films for decades, but those things and few others can be overlooked to finally enjoy a good action film. A few more things to note include a car chase that Aintitcool’s Moriarty got a chance to see being cut together. He described it as something that hasn’t been seen before and he was correct. If you’ve ever driven a car, talked on the cell phone, and drank a cup of coffee all at the same time then you will, probably for the first time ever, be able to relate to a high-speed car chase. About an hour and fifteen minutes into it, I was convinced that they were going to leave a ton of things unexplained, but they didn’t. There was a problem establishing motivation for one of the characters, but in hindsight, not having that motivation be clear, and having time travel make sense was a good swap. One last thing to mention is Denzel and the leading lady. Denzel just doesn’t screw up these days. He commands attention quite similar to early Pacino (yes I did it) in that you can’t take your eyes off him. When he first sees the girl that sets the mystery in full swing, there is a type of grief spread across his face that is undeniably believable. He has never met this woman and right when he stares at her burned body, he falls in love. A lesser actor would have screwed that up royally, but he makes it work. It also doesn’t hurt that burned or not burned Paula Patton is drop dead gorgeous. Déjà vu is worth it. It is not overlong. I think the final runtime was between 2 hours and 2 hours and 10 minutes. It is a tight, well-paced action film with a bit of heart thrown in.
