Kritiken

Tony Scott embraces both the old and the new, when he routes traditional cinematic subjectivity through the fragmenting and alienating pressures of the most advanced technologies. He manages, miraculously, to have it both ways: to make a film that expresses both the cybernetic future into which we are rushing, and the now-receded modernist heroism of an earlier era; and to make a film that experiments with the best of the avant-garde, while remaining committed to mainstream action-movie values.

Tony Scott's obsession with surveillance, a project that began with the prophetic and amazingly pre-9/11 Enemy of the State and continued with Spy Game and Domino, culminates in his late-period masterpiece Déjà Vu. [It] pushes forward the traditional Scott theme of watching and being watched by literally taking it backwards, as Scott manipulates time and space in an attempt to make his "monitors" the good guys for once.

A sci-fi love story that also happens to be the director's best film, the clearest expression of his late-period ideas, and, well, one of the greatest films of the past decade.

Take away a couple of neatly staged action sequences and you're left with a callously measured slab of US jingoism that deals with the most horrific human tragedies in the most lunk-headed and insulting way possible. But the message is clear: don't worry, people, the forces of evil have been licked. Thank God for time travel.

Maybe the comparative restraint and metaphysical bent of Scott's masterpiece, a surveillance-era post-Hitchcock concoction that dares to begin with a nine-minute bravura sequence of dialogue-free "pure cinema," will help viewers see past the prejudices. Ironically, it's one of the most mind-boggling action sequences of recent years, in which some of the great Scott's major motifs are condensed into one awesome pile-up of overlapping motion.

The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess.

If there's a familiarity to the film's wired mise-en-scène, use of both Denzel and a cute Fanning girl (here, a cameoing Elle), and a climactic act of redemptive martyrdom, don't worry—it's not an instance of the titular phenomenon but, rather, the more mundane result of Scott merely replicating Man on Fire.

The story recalls Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) in its romantic moodiness and has some of the philosophical poignance common to tales of time travel. But the SF hardware (enjoyable) and thriller mechanics (mechanical) of this Jerry Bruckheimer slam-banger don't mesh very well with reflection, and the action trumps most evidence of thought.