Déjà Vu (2006)

Déjà Vu stars Denzel Washington as a New Orleans based ATF agent who after a terrorist attack on a ferry boat kills hundreds, is recruited by a secret government team to apprehend the perpetrator. Said team has top secret technology that allows them use wormholes to look exactly 4 days, 6 hours, 3 minutes, 45 seconds, 14.5 nanoseconds into the past. I have quite a few problems with this film, and there will be spoilers. First off I don't think the scale of the media response to the attack is depicted as big enough, though I guess one only has so much money to pay bit players to pretend to be reporters. Also that bridge near the attack scene would have quickly been shut down to traffic, if for no other reason then to prevent people from stopping on it to gawk and potentially interfere with the investigation, though again I get how shutting a major bridge down for filming would have been difficult.

So lets get into the time travel and paradox stuff, first this technology is far too sensitive to just let an unveted and unbriefed ATF agent in on it. If the government had this technology, they would train special investigators to use it, and keep it very locked up hush, hush, Washington's character gets into all this far to easily. Solving Paula Patton's death is supposed to be the key to unraveling the larger crime, but Washington falls in love with her while investigating her murder, like Dana Andrews does Gene Tierney in the classic movie Laura. As a result Washington violates protocol and endangers potentially all of existence, by using the wormhole to travel back in time. In doing so Washington is responsible for many of the clues he would later find in investigating the crime the first time, so it shouldn't be possible for him to save Paula because clearly he went back in time already and failed, otherwise he would never have found the body that prompted him to go back in time. This movies paradox is an inconsistent mess, had Washington failed in his mission at the end I actually would have liked it because then all the pieces would have fit together logically, and it would have upset conventional expectations that there must be a happy ended. However this did not happen, and I kind of hated this movie. There were clichés, there were slow stretches, and while the last third was fairly good in terms of screen action, those were the same sequences that invalidate the logic of the original set up. I'm a stickler for this kind of thing. *1/2