Even when we first meet her as a corpse on a slab, Claire is somehow presented as a sex object, a fixed expression on her face that hardly seems indicative of her ghastly death. Carlin watches, entranced, with easy listening playing on the soundtrack. The voyeuristic scenes of Carlin and the FBI agents watching Claire in her apartment are milked to an over-the-top degree, with Claire constantly striking glamour-model poses and perpetually in various states of undress, even though she's just hanging around her apartment. So, if I feel like someone's watching me, maybe it's crime investigators in the future trying to piece together what happens to me a few days from now? At least it looks like I don't have to worry about déjà vu-not being a law enforcement official involved in a high-tech crime investigation. Later, she makes a note in her diary about "that weird 'I'm being watched' feeling." "Hello? Hello?" she calls uncertainly, looking around her apartment and then wandering out into the hallway. All the time, though, the past marches on as relentlessly as the present, and there's a complicated, possibly disingenuous technobabble explanation for why there are no do-overs, no rewinding, no fast-forwarding.Ĭarlin doesn't mind the view of Claire's boudoir, but he doesn't necessarily buy the feds' technobabble about how the chronoscope works-especially when Claire herself seems aware of something out of the ordinary. Within their surveillance radius, the FBI team can see literally anything happening four days ago-even looking through walls, a bit like in Scott's earlier Enemy of the State, thus allowing agents to peer in on the last hours of a murder victim named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) as she changes clothes, showers and so forth. He isn't kidding about the "exactly once" part. Responsible for all this is a top-secret FBI surveillance technology that-according to the official explanation offered to Carlin-reconstructs an on-the-fly virtual view of the recent past by synthesizing input from all available sources, from satellite photography to local security cameras, into a single, continuous roving image of life as it was four and a half days earlier. Are you thinking fourth-dimensionally yet? Beyond that, Déjà Vu pursues its science-fiction conceit to some nifty places, including an extraordinary cross-temporal chase scene in which the hero must negotiate traffic in one timeframe while "following" a vehicle more than half a week in the past. To begin with, this time it's the bad guy blowing people up, which is always a good thing. No, it's not the odious Man on Fire all over again-fortunately, it's quite a bit better than that. Denzel Washington as ATF agent Doug CarlinĮven some viewers may have a feeling of déjà vu, what with odd bits of God talk and spiritual references juxtaposed with fingers being lopped off, duct-taped faces and prisoners with hands affixed to steering wheels, a kidnapped damsel in deadly distress, and deadly explosions, all in a hypercaffeinated Tony Scott thriller starring a sunglasses-wearing Denzel Washington, set in a down-and-out Mexican/Gulf area city, and featuring a quasi-christological climax.
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