Time Travel Thursday: Deja Vu (2006)
Review Overview
Time travel tropes
6Overblown plot
5Time split car chase
7Matthew Turner | On 27, Jan 2022
Director: Tony Scott
Cast: Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Jim Caviezel, Bruce Greenwood, Adam Goldberg, Elden Henson, Matt Craven, Elle Fanning
Certificate: 12
Has Boss Level whetted your appetite for more time travel titilation? Transport yourself no further than Time Travel Thursday, our column devoted to time travel movies. It’s on Thursday.
Deja Vu (2006) represents a rare foray into big-budget science fiction for both star Denzel Washington and director Tony Scott. It was the third of the five films they made together and, while it has its fair share of flaws, it also provides a good deal of big, dumb time travel-related fun.
Washington plays ATF Agent Doug Carlin, who’s brought in to investigate a horrific bombing on a New Orleans ferry. His sleuthing skills soon draw the attention of FBI Special Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer), who recruits Carlin into a newly formed detective unit, who just happen to have a surveillance machine that can see three days into the past.
Taking the new time window technology in his stride, Carlin and his team use the machine to track Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), one of the victims, who seems to be involved. And when Claire leads Carlin to the real killer, Doug starts to wonder if it might be possible to send back a message back through time that will save Claire and stop the attack from ever happening.
Deja Vu ticks several of the established time travel trope boxes. Firstly, there’s an honest-to-goodness time machine, named Snow White. It may look like a time window surveillance device, but anyone who thinks that thing isn’t going to be used to send a human back through time before the end of the movie – “You absolutely cannot send someone through the field, it’s just too risky!” protests a scientist – has clearly never seen a time travel movie before.
There are other fun touches, such as the time travel tease of Carlin hearing his own voice on Claire’s answering machine, before he’s even heard of the special detective unit. The idea that Doug has unwittingly made multiple previous failed attempts to save Claire is something that the film feints at but never really explores in satisfying fashion, instead just using it as an excuse to introduce further clues.
Scott directs in his customary overblown fashion – it’s produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who never met an explosion that couldn’t be 10 times bigger – and you can immediately tell which time travel element specifically attracted him to the movie in the first place. That would be the portable Snow White device, which allows Scott to stage the film’s best action sequence: a split-screen car chase that takes place across two separate time periods.
The performances are about what you’d expect for this sort of thing. Washington deserves credit for keeping a commendably straight face throughout, giving the role his customary earnestness. Similarly, Adam Goldberg is good value as a wise-cracking member of the time team, although the film criminally wastes Val Kilmer, whose character is given next to nothing of interest to do after recruiting Doug in the first place.
The film’s biggest problem is its pacing, which can’t sustain its two-hour running time and drags considerably for long stretches of time as a result. In particular, there’s a lengthy, tedious section involving Doug’s partner (played by Matt Craven) that could have been cut with no significant loss to the film overall.
It’s also fair to say that the choice of ending feels imposed by the studio and isn’t quite as satisfying as the film seems to think. That said, it does at least recover the pace for a genuinely thrilling final act with an exciting, superbly edited climax.