DVD Watch: Deja Vu

OK, so a quick post.

After much debate about whether we'd be active and social this Saturday, I took a two hour nap and then we settled on the couch. Determining whether one should or should not be active can be extremely tiring, after all.

It got late after some rounds of golf on the PS2, so I opted we watch the least cerebral movie in our stack - Deja Vu. Deja Vu is a Bruckheimer/Ridley Scott affair with Denzel Washington as a federal agent who gets caught up in a special unit capable of reviewing virtually any spot within a certain radius of their magic device exactly four days ago. He and this crack team (including Adam Goldberg playing ... well, Adam Goldberg and someone who looks like he might have eaten Val Kilmer) use this to investigate a terrorist strike.

If you don't want any spoilers, stop reading here.

The thing with Deja Vu is that it feels like a couple of movies wedged together. About half way through it was apparently decided that simply reviewing the past wasn't neat and interesting enough. Now despite have been shown that much of the view is digitally recreated (including half-rendered people and the like) - suddenly the twist is that the machine is actually a wormhole into the past. Denzel figures this out, and I kid you not, by shining a laser pointer at the wormhole's monitor. By some physics defining event, the laser goes four days into the past and subsequently starts to confuse the movie a bit.

Well that's not entirely fair. For a moment, this seems to up the ante a bit. There are some moral questions about what do if you could actually alter the past, the impact that would have (if any) and some other neat bits. Unfortunately the plot never quites survive the splice and where one twist feels like it was put in to save the second half of the movie, no additional twist is brought in to save the ending.

It's not bad, but it's something of a letdown by the end. Watch while sober at your own peril.