Speaking of Déjà Vu, I’ve had a wonderful idea for a movie franchise called Pimp My Ghastly Plot. Like all brilliant ideas, it felt familiar.

I sat in a cinema watching Denzel Washington snap on his sunglasses to inspect another routine murder in New Orleans. The opening credits came to a wobbly halt. A packed ferry exploded. Hundreds of innocent extras died in flaming slow motion. Underwater shots featuring trashed cars raining down on the Mississippi, and still-burning humans in the process of drowning. They must have cost a fortune — but good taste has never knowingly fetched a dime from Jerry Bruckheimer’s huge pockets (see feature).

The first act of Déjà Vu is almost precision-made to irritate teens doped on sensory overload, the audience that won’t get out of bed to watch a picture under $100 million. This is Groundhog Day for action fans. Washington hasn’t changed his smarter-than-thou cop routine for ten years. His hollow, toothy laughs and humiliating arrogance leave just enough room for a leading lady.

A crack team of blundering FBI agents is rapidly assembled to trace the boat bomber. Precious leads are fumbled. Washington’s bionic cop assembles the entire jigsaw in seconds but fixates on the most exotic piece of evidence, a young model, Claire, despite the fact that she’s got third- degree burns, fingers missing, and is stone dead.

Only an act of insanity could possibly save this film, and Tony Scott duly provides. He not only tarts up his crusty reels into a science- fiction thriller, he pimps the very little sense left in his film quite brilliantly. In short, he gives up on the real world and asks the kind of questions a normal delinquent would pose. What if a top-secret government cabal of bearded, pizza-loving science geeks had the technology to transport Denzel Washington back to the past, say four days and six hours before the bomb destroys the ferry? Denzel could empty six bullets into the psycho’s skull, put 20 grand on the 3.40 at Sandown Park, and still have four days, five hours and fifty-five minutes to play Romeo with the scrumptious Claire (Paula Patton). Even Tom Cruise never had this kind of comfort zone in Minority Report.

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

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