Mediocrity, Reviews, and the movie, Deja Vu

Note: If you have not seen the movie, the following notes will make no sense to you. You can read a review with a synopsis of the plot here.

It's interesting to see a too-obviously aging Denzel Washington and a pudgy Val Kilmer talking about good looks being lost with time. The movie is smart and definitely for grown-ups, in spite of the things that were obviously toned down to get a PG-13. This could have been one edgy, ugly motherfucker, not unlike Se7en or Hostel. Hollywood guaranteed mediocrity by making the scene of the first explosion easy-to-take, you can't have the scene with burning US servicemen being too ugly. Also, the Timothy McVeigh-like bad-guy shoots a guy before setting him on fire. Another weak, ball-less moment, when Hollywood sacrificed the idea that would have set this movie apart. There is no way that the writers wanted that, it fucked the whole experience. Denzel Washington does his thing from the Pelican Brief and his other more forgettable films where he laughs at odd moments to make the performance seem unpredictable, have a more uneven rhythm, kind of the way Robert Duvall does it. It felt like laughter by a man watching his underachieving career slowly sink in an arctic ocean of young white people. Take it from me, in a couple years Denzel will be playing fatherly school-janitors and other Scatman Crothers-type roles.

The first two-thirds of the movie, including the introduction of the time-machine and the science thereof, is clever, plausible, well-written. Poorly casted because there is nothing about Washington that says to me, ATF Agent, unlike say, Bruce Willis who has law-enforcement tattooed into his DNA. Don't get me wrong, Denzel has the leading-man screen-presence so rare among black actors, just not for this kind of movie. If Will Smith had been better in I, Robot, I would consider him for this part if you definitely had to give it to a black man. Anyway, back to the writing. Well-written up until the bad-guy gets caught two-thirds in, then they don't know where to go. It's clear that they then figured out the ending that they wanted to have (DW and the girl hooking up and driving off into the sunset) and cobbled up some shit to get them there. There are some smart touches, like beaming him into an ER because his heart will stop, but the story never recovers.

What I do like is that nothing is spoon-fed to the audience. It all makes sense, but you have to think, pretty much guaranteeing that the young people going into a PG-13 movie starring Denzel Washington, will be hopelessly lost and confused.

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