Déjà vu is a nifty little science-fiction flick, though it’s more of a chamber piece masquerading as a Beethoven symphony. Directed by Tony Scott (who usually operates as the Costco version of Michael Bay), and starring Denzel Washington, it’s mostly engaging, until it ultimately somehow fails to engage the viewer.
As a movie, it’s an enjoyable clockwork puzzle to watch. Denzel recycles the quicksilver charisma from all his recent detective roles (most notably Inside Man), and holds the film together as a dedicated ATF agent called to the scene of a ferry explosion. The opening minutes, which linger on the passengers boarding the doomed ferry, feel like Michael Bay-lite. Multiple cuts, white flashes, and slow-motion shots of cheery sailors and crying babies unwittingly walking toward doom are hack directorial tools.
Sure, it’s necessary to create an emotional attachment to the story or some other line of crap, blah blah blah, but Scott is impatient to get to the big boom. Until the fireworks go off, he has to amuse himself with every random camera trick in the book, which is where he goes wrong as a filmmaker. Michael Bay, the faux-teur who almost single-handedly inflicted this aesthetic of gibberish upon the audience, remains the only guy who can shamelessly get it right. Think back to the montage at the end of Armageddon, where perfectly multicultural kids from around the world celebrate the noble sacrifice of Bruce Willis with an impossible, AT&T-commercial variant of innocence. The single shot alone of freckle faced kids with perfectly missing teeth, playing with a red wagon and a cardboard space shuttle, running in a glorious sun-dappled slow-motion shot is unforgivably manipulative, but it’s effective. Bay hasn’t forgotten his roots as a commercial director; and his ability to sucker punch overload a single image with shameless manipulation is unparalleled. Tony Scott has similar roots in commercials, but his interests as a filmmaker have pushed him far beyond the single image, and like his style or not, he’s got bigger fish to fry.
The agenda in that opening couple of minutes seems mostly to be a) fill time for the credits, and b) impatiently sketch in a bunch of victims to be gruesomely dispatched. As soon as the bombs go off, Scott’s pulse starts to palpably rise. This is what he’s interested in, now, and the movie responds. The shots of the explosion are as effective and as calculated as most bombs in the Bay oeuvre. In particular, an underwater shot where the cars and bodies sink in silhouette as the water churns from a murky green to a fire-orange is breathtaking. The soft fields of color could have come from a Chagall painting, with the urban shadows turning it toward the sinister.
These are the shots and sequences that are at the pinnacle of big budget studio filmmaking. There isn’t an indie production out there that can match the power of tens of millions of dollars dedicated to just blowing some shit up. When you add in all the variables that a director now has control over: precise and exact shades of coloring, 3D modeling that can control each shard of shrapnel, and frequency rattling sound design that covers the entire audible spectrum, the amount of control that money can buy is staggering. Likewise, the skill required to burn through all of those tools is equally staggering, and to intercut millions of dollars in pseudo-disaster with Hurricane Katrina fallout takes a deft hand. Though hipsters and snobby critics like to bash the Tony Scott aesthetic, he’s definitely onto something, and when his directorial interests are aroused, he can skillfully lead an audience anyplace he wants to take them.
The movie slips into gear with that fateful explosion, and begins as a police procedural. Denzel efficiently acts as a composite of all the first-response tragedy investigators, surveying the damage for the true hints of terrorism. He’s every smart, quirky, perceptive, loner cop detective hero we’ve seen over the years, but so what? In how many different movies did Fred Astaire play the charming, romantically swooning young man who just happens to have marvelous dancing skills? We’ve seen it before, but it’s always engaging to watch.
After that grounding in reality, the film veers into the fantastic. After some nifty technical jargon, the big hook comes out to blindside the audience: the FBI has a device that lets them look back in time! From here a taut puzzle of time-travel and detective work takes hold. There’s a clever chase scene, replete with some nifty special effects, leading up to the obvious twist that Denzel, the only non-nuclear scientist in the room, figures out. It’s all passably engaging, but still it feels slight.
All of which leads to the final thought: Is that it? After so much carefully executed sturm-und-drang, is that all there is to the story? Artful CGI still has a problem conveying mass, and commercial-minded Hollywood has over stimulated audience expectations to the point of lunacy. It’s tragic, somehow, that one good hook doesn’t feel meaty enough to sustain a movie anymore. When all the pieces fit together, and there hasn’t been a ludicrous scene of disarming a nuclear bomb, or a spontaneous invasion of Cuba, or the glorious immolation of three square blocks, the movie somehow feels hollow. It certainly isn’t hollow, but neither is it backed up by the muscular storytelling.
If anything, it’s more of a disappointment in the Hollywood expectations, than in the film itself. But still Déjà vu is a watchable flick, sure to have long legs on video and cable TV.
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