Denzel Washington has seen an interesting thing happen to
his career as he’s gotten older — he’s become more popular and commercially
bankable, both at home and abroad, all without denting his critical notices. Certainly
no stranger to the same sort of savvy, calculating selection of commercial fare
that Harrison Ford has practiced throughout his career — of
The Pelican Brief, he famously said with
a sly smirk, “Well, it was a no-brainer” — Washington had only three of his
films gross more than $70 million domestically throughout the 1990s. Since
2000, he’s had already
five pull that
number, with a sixth, Jonathan Demme’s politicized remake of
The Manchurian Candidate, coming within
$4 million of said mark.
What’s at the root of Washington’s
burgeoning appeal? Well, for one thing, he’s very obviously making the sorts of
movies that Ford should be making — cat-and-mouse-type thrillers and puzzlebox
mysteries in which Washington
serves as our unflappable guide. Though Washington has more range and a deeper
emotional rapport with audiences than Ford (hence the relative success of
something like the otherwise treacly John
Q, which survives on the white-hot heat of Washington’s passionate
performance as a desperate blue-collar parent trying to broker a heart
transplant for his dying son), both he and Ford’s strong suit lies in the
profound and innate sense of identification they elicit among viewers.
Given their much smaller margins on return, bread-and-butter
genre movies are the slot machines of Hollywood
— a fool’s game, but one that studios have to at least occasionally play to
remain players for top-drawer talent. A star like Washington, then, is an ace
in the hole — someone who can play the dogged cop or fallen hero given one last
chance at reinvention and redemption, and yet give those chestnuts some nuance
and make those formulas sing.
Re-teaming Washington with Crimson Tide and Man on Fire
director Tony Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the dressed-up, techno-thriller
Déjà Vu is certainly of a piece with
this configuration. Scripted by Terry Rossio and Bill Marsilii, the movie tells
the story of Washington’s experienced
ATF agent, Doug Carlin, who’s called in to recover evidence and help
investigate a terrorist ferry bombing in New Orleans.
Carlin quickly figures out that there’s some sort of a connection between that
monstrous act, perpetrated by disgruntled Army reject Carroll Oerstadt (Jim
Caviezel, oozing his usual Caviezel-ness), and the single murder of Claire
Kuchever (Idlewild’s Paula Patton).
It’s then that Agent Pryzwarra (a chunky Val Kilmer) and his
higher-up, Jack McCready (Bruce Greenwood), recruit Carlin to help them catch
the at-that-point-unknown suspect, and let Carlin in on a secret: they have a
device that can bend time and space, thus allowing them to see into the past
four and a half days. Without getting into all the head-spinning specifics,
this leads to a bunch of voyeuristic investigative work and a unique twist on
the old car chase standard — a pursuit spanning two time periods, in which Washington
zips around with a headset trying to stay close to an object that exists in a
parallel plain. Eventually, after trying to signal his “past self,” Carlin even
leaps back in time.
Confused? Playing down (perhaps smartly) its time-jumping
element, distributor Buena Vista billed Déjà
Vu as “the movie behind the feeling,” banking that filmgoers associate the
phrase more with intuitive investigation than temporal recurrence. That tack
played to so-so theatrical returns Stateside, but the film was almost double
the hit internationally ($115 million to $64 million) that it was here, further
highlighting Washington’s drawing
power.
In truth, there’s a good bit more flash than substance here,
not that one minds all that much if a piece of throwaway entertainment is their
chief aim. Director Scott’s reputation as a visual stylist affords him lots of
extra canvas, and he teases the film’s chief conceit into a grand affair. All
the mind-bending mumbo-jumbo boils down into the requisite race to save (or is
that reclaim?) hundreds of innocent lives, and if there’s a bit of lacking in
the actual meat-on-bones department, narratively speaking, through it all
Washington is the perfect proactive escort we’ve come to expect.
On DVD, Déjà Vu comes
in a nice glossy, faux-holographic O-ring cardboard slipcover with raised
lettering, and is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16x9
televisions. A few issues with edge enhancement pop up, but the transfer is
free from grain and captures cinematographer Paul Cameron’s saturated, high-contrast
palettes (from the blue-green of Agent Pryzwarra’s work space to the orange
tint of Claire’s house) with aplomb. The Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio
track is clear and distortion-free, making fairly subtle use of its rear
channels until a car chase and some late third-act action explodes in a panoply
of source noise; French and Spanish language audio tracks and complementary
subtitles are also available.
The supplemental material kicks off with 13 minutes of deleted
and extended scenes with optional commentary from Scott, though almost all of
the new material, by my calculation, includes heads and tail bits from other surrounding
scenes. These are chiefly interstitial bits, not massively developed and
discarded story strands. One bit does point up, though, the filmmakers’ trims
to secure a PG-13 rating.
The chief bonus item is a half-hour-plus mash-up of 10 featurettes entitled “Surveillance
Window,” which allows viewers to toggle back and forth between the feature
presentation and little snippets on various aspects of the movie, from stunt
work and the planning of the ferry explosion to the split-time car chase and
location shoot in New Orleans. Though they can be viewed on their own, this is
a nice alternative to have, a nod to how DVD viewing is fundamentally different
from the theatrical experience, allowing as it does viewers to spin off and
answer how’d-they-do-that? moments at
their own discretion. There’s also a separately recorded audio commentary track
with Scott, Bruckheimer and writer Marsilli, though, somewhat frustratingly,
this is available only through the selection of the aforementioned “Surveillance
Window” option, and not as a discrete audio track. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
