Deja Vu
"Déjà Vu" is a stratospherically high concept action-thriller that has Denzel Washington -- in his umpteenth lawman role -- going back in time to stop a murderer and save hundreds of lives.
As ATF agent Doug Carlin, his most urgent rescue involves a young lovely (Paula Patton) whose dead body washes ashore the same day a terrorist blows up a crowded ferry. Did the terrorist kill her, too? And can Washington, using the latest toys from the Hollywood physics lab, even fit through the rip in the time-space continuum?
You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. "Déjà Vu" is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans. And, in its own bullet-riddled, pyrotechnic way, the picture feels like a celebration of the city's resilience.
Our dead girl is a vivacious Creole. Doug watches her in footage captured from a satellite surveillance arrangement (don't ask) operated by FBI-sponsored hipster-physicists . He's basically spying on a ghost who stands in for the battered Gulf Coast region.
Granted, this is a Tony Scott picture. So, one could also argue that Doug and the quartet of eggheads (including Val Kilmer and Adam Goldberg) are just watching a woman disrobe and shower and dress herself. But unlike Scott's previous exercises in lurid voyeurism -- "The Last Boy Scout," or last year's "Domino" -- this movie has a knowing laugh about it.
Carlin and the scientists -- one of whom is a woman (Erika Alexander) -- sit in a dark control room similar to the bigger one in Scott's hit surveillance thriller, "Enemy of the State." Occasionally Patton will look into a hidden camera and Washington, whose smile is the movie's secret weapon, gazes at her up on the screen with a moonstruck look. Of course, he has to go back in time: She's cute. Plus, Carlin is miffed to learn that there's more to this satellite business than Kilmer and company let on. (Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio wrote the clever script.)
With hyperactive camerawork and hopscotch editing, the surveillance system doubles as a metaphor for Scott's moviemaking, down to its borderline tastelessness. But the scuzzy, tweaked-out style of Scott's last couple of films -- "Man on Fire" and "Domino," -- isn't as morally appalling as usual.
The opening ferry explosion reeks of poetry, but Scott's directing is on meds in " Déjà Vu," resulting in an action movie that seems slightly human. Scott and his frequent producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, follow Carlin through the movie's wormhole. The character's race against time becomes theirs -- a race to undo all the gratuitous, disturbingly sexy death they've concocted over the decades.
Usually a Scott-Bruckheimer production sends you home wanting a shower. But here they've caught the movie's unstoppable bayou spirit and send you home on a high. Come back, the movie says of New Orleans. Live again.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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