Deja Vu Review

 “A time bender that just doesn’t work”

 The other day I played a game with some people called “How many times has Denzel played a cop?”.  I realized that he has literally played a cop for almost all of his roles.  I know there are roles where he hasn’t, but he’s pretty much typecasted.  Following up a pretty gripping preformance in Man on Fire, Denzel re-teams with Tony “Super-cuts” Scott for Deja Vu, a sci-fi thriller involving a post-Katrina New Orleans.  The trailer looked badass, so of course I was in.  I even got to see it for free, via advanced screening pass.  Thankfully I didn’t spend the dough on this wad of junk.

So thats the formula of my reviews, you read a quirky intro, that segues, usually in the last line to the next paragraph where I discuss my emotions.  It’s kind of the way Deja Vu makes me feel.  It was very formulaic.  It had some clear rip-offs of other sci-fi time benders.  It’s hard not to be attracted to the action and to the effects and even a semi-decent story, but this movie ends up being on the drabber kind.  I feel like I may look back years from now and say how this movie was underrated, but it’s hard to say.  The concepts seem too played out, and even Scott’s flair for visuals doesn’t help get this off the ground.

Denzel plays a cop.  Val Kilmer’s kind of cool. You stick around for the action and the decent little story, but in the end it feels very formluaic and not reminiscent of anything unique and original.  I’d probably watch it again because it’s cool.  But it’s really not worthing shelling the money out to see in theaters.  Some scenes are frantically trying to be different and end up being pretty lame i.e. the car chase that happens 4 days apart.  The third act was obviously a way to try and tie up the movie’s loose ends.  It didn’t work.  The movie’s pretty drab, with no real over the top cool action.  I give this a 5 out of 10 Bones for just being pretty entertaining, thoughtless fodder.

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