More Candy Coated Bruckheimer Glam

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2006)

This Bruckheimer gem quickly dispels with the necessary and gratuitous distillation of cracker jack movie physics to explain things to us (how many times are we going to get the folded up piece of paper demo for how to travel thru time?). It's basically soda pop scifi to enable yet another formulaic Denzel-chasing-the-bad-guys movie.
Once Denzel becomes suspicious of the incredible technology, the experts (who look like rejects from the cast of Rent) give him the standard 30 second Hollywood distillation of how the technology works. Denzel gets this news of the century, and somehow it doesn't phase him at all (maybe because he can't believe it either). Granted, he's wrapped up in solving a terrorist plot, but still, one has to wonder how that somehow would not cause at least a wee bit of shock and awe.
Some other things observed:
-Denzel very quickly piecing together the underlying secrets of the technology he's witnessing
-Denzel figuring out that shining a laser pen pointer into the projector screen actually gets sent to the past.
-Denzel actually carrying a laser pointer around in his front pocket. Is this SOP for an ATF agent? I dunno, maybe it is.
-Light from Denzel's laser pointer can go through a display/screen yet anything else has to go through a separate huge machine, including Denzel, who throws himself at this task without pause.
-Said time machine / teleporter would constitute an earth shattering news (let alone being able to see a real-time feed of the past).
-This huge machine existing somewhere in the New Orleans area yet nobody has found it (despite huge electrical power grid failures due to it and scores of army personnel hanging around)
-A doughy, pudgy faced Val Kilmer having a short, meaningless, throw away role in this film, essentially there to collect a paycheck.
-The "bad guy" seems to have some knowledge of a conspiracy involving the government and its technology to affect or alter the past/future, yet neither this or the character are really developed.
-The female victim somehow falls in love with Denzel in a NY minute, I guess for thanks and payback for rescuing her.
I'm starting to think that all Denzel's roles of late are the same guy. Great talent, but it's like everything he does is a variation on the same theme, sort of like Tommy Lee Jones spat of films where he's chasing someone, somewhere.
The last 15 minutes of this film are good. It's just too bad the rest couldn't be. Then again, it's Bruckheimer folks, and that unfortunately says it all.