Sorry for the lateness of this entry but I was occupied with bank holiday goodness.
Only watched one film this week and I had the feeling I'd seen it before.
Deja Vu (2006)
I know what you are thinking, yes, this quality of humour does come naturally to me.
This science fiction crime thriller is directed by Tony Scott and stars Denzel Washington, Paula Patton and Val Kilmer and deals with the aftermath of a terrorist bomb that destroys a ferry carrying US sailors in New Orleans.
The start of the film is an extremely compelling thriller, given edge with Tony Scott's fast, detailed filming style which really works with the style of film as it did with similar styled films like Man on Fire. The first thirty or forty minutes of the film then really create this world very realistically, Denzel Washington not on his finest form but even on relative cruise control he is extremely watchable and likeable, his character ATF agent Carlin ends up being a lonely, driven, intelligent man. A character Denzel seems to excel at.
However, the film then lurches into science fiction time travel. A difficult subject at the best of times to handle well. It is a pity then that aside from several very good ideas and scenes, the film becomes more predictable the more it tries to become clever. Ending with a whimper when it started with a bang.
The supporting cast are well picked and are given a good script to work with and as a result Val Kilmer is very well fleshed out for such a role. Paula Patton is very underused, the trailers and posters imply a much more important part for her and whilst she is important to the film, she's present on the screen far less than you'd imagine but when she is on the screen, she is impressive in the role. The bad guy, played by Jim Cavaziel, is by far the weakest link in the characters, a rhetoric spewing, pseudo-philosophical domestic nutjob that really denies the film the sense of menace it could have possessed.
The problem with time travel is that it is very hard to make a sensible, logical and easy to follow narrative and when you introduce this very unexpected element into a very realistic film setting, no matter how plausible the time travel is, it doesn't fit in. Although, in a technical sense, the film starts out not being about time travel, the plot device is a method to see 4 days and 6 hours into the past but the 'past' time runs at the same speed as ours so you only get to see this 'past' events once. Denzel eventually realises that he can communicate with his past self. One very good idea was a car chase between Denzel and a car that was on the same roads 4 days, 6 hours ago. It's a great application of the idea and just highlights just how uneffective the rest of the film was. Towards the end of the film when you start to see how a building in the 'present' is a wreck and the same building in the past was still standing then you can really start to see what is going to happen. It's a pity because I enjoy a good time travel story.
I consider Deja Vu really to be an inferior Source Code, both thrillers about utilising time travel to solve a crime but where Soure Code had the threat of another strike to give a time constraint, Deja Vu is simply about 'looking' in the right place at the right time and uncovering who already commited the crime. It lacks the thrilling edge of Source Code.
All in all, it was something that didn't strike me as being especially compelling when I first saw the trailers but thanks to BBC iPlayer, I got to see it for free, so I can't really complain.
Trailer:
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