Cool Filmz: Déjà Vu and the Fun of Chasing Yesterday

Back in May 2007, when I reviewed Déjà Vu for Cover-Ups.com, the idea of the government hiding a time machine was enough to get me interested. Tony Scott directing Denzel Washington gave me another reason to show up.

The happy surprise was how much fun the movie had with its premise. I gave it four UFOs, which translates to a King here at Cool Filmz.
Naturally, early in the old review I joked that I felt as though I had already seen the movie. Or was it déjà vu? You knew that joke was coming. Apparently, even in 2007, I knew you knew it was coming. We might as well get it out of the way again.

Curated from the Cover-Ups.com review dated May 20, 2007

Washington plays Doug Carlin, an ATF agent investigating a devastating ferry bombing in New Orleans. He notices things other people miss, which makes him useful to an FBI team with a piece of equipment considerably more impressive than the usual surveillance setup. These people can look into the past. What they cannot necessarily do is figure out where to look.
That was one of the ideas I liked most. You can give the government an astonishing machine and still need somebody with good instincts sitting in front of it. Carlin brings the attention to detail. Washington brings that familiar intelligence, confidence and dry humor that make watching him work through a problem entertaining even before anybody starts bending the space-time continuum.

The investigation draws him toward Claire Kuchever, played by Paula Patton, whose death appears connected to the bombing. Val Kilmer is the FBI agent bringing Carlin into the operation, and Jim Caviezel supplies the terrorist at the center of the mystery. Claire gives the technical wizardry a human point of focus. Looking backward becomes a much more urgent proposition when there is somebody back there you want to save.

I am still not going to try to explain every turn of the plot. My original review admitted that doing so would probably confuse you, and that seems like a sound editorial policy to preserve. The fun is watching the movie reveal what its machine can do, then finding out what Carlin is willing to try with it. You do have to accept some spectacularly convenient government technology. This is probably not the movie to watch with somebody who insists on approving the equipment specifications first.
The standout for me was the car chase across different points in time. Carlin is pursuing somebody whose movements belong to the past while navigating the world in front of him. In the original review, I described it as chasing the villain from four days in the future, followed by the very useful scientific qualification “or something like that.” The exact explanation was less memorable than the sheer inventiveness of the sequence. It gave a familiar action-movie ingredient a reason to feel unfamiliar.

And Déjà Vu keeps working little details back into the story. An apparently trivial observation acquires a purpose later; something that looked strange begins to fit. That was what won me over. For a movie inviting this much confusion, I found it engaging and surprisingly easy to follow. It gets you looking for the connections instead of merely waiting for the next explosion.
There are, of course, questions. Could you go back a few days and run into yourself? Could the two of you have a conversation? Would either of you understand the explanation? My old review suggested that Uncle Benny might already have managed it, which would explain why he was always muttering to himself. I cannot offer that as peer-reviewed evidence, but I am keeping the joke.

The paradoxes did not spoil the experience for me in 2007. I thought Déjà Vu delivered a very good science-fiction thriller with a terrific lead performance and enough imagination to make its action worth watching. That is the verdict this archive visit preserves. If the premise requires you to give the government a little too much credit, Washington makes a persuasive case for letting it slide for an evening.

Back then, I said it was so good you would think you had seen it before. Maybe you had. Maybe your parallel self had. Either way, four UFOs then and a King now. Some recommendations can survive a trip through time.