Well-done, tricky, time-travel crime thriller.

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2007)

If you should tune in to this film after the first twenty minutes or so, you are likely to be clueless about what happens afterward. It's confusing enough from the beginning. Instead of deja vu (already seen) I finished it with an uncanny feeling of presque vu (almost seen).
A special government agency has these satellites, you see, which are able to peer down and capture events in and near New Orleans in incredible detail. Nothing much new there. But the thing is, the picture the agents get is, dig it, four days old! And it's a trailing four day period, meaning that the events they are looking at on their giant TV screen are happening in real time. And as the agents spend their "present" watching the images, the "past" they are viewing travels along with them, always four days old.
The satellites are not only able to capture any normal images of events in public spaces either. They have "infra red" capacity that allows them to penetrate buildings and walls and see inside people's apartments and offices. And they pick up the audio as well. Of course this opens up new vistas, which the agents take advantage of by watching the drop-dead gorgeous Paula Patton take a shower.
Not wanting to run out of space here, and space is our problem now, not time, although we're assured they're one and the same, I'd better -- wait a minute. It occurs to me that I just spent too much of the space/time continuum explaining why I couldn't spend too much of the space/time continuum. Well, it's all no more confusing than the science and technology we see in this movie.
To cut to the chase, a domestic terrorist (James Caviezel) blows up a big ferry, killing any number of people, including the partner of Denzel Washington, who's an ATF agent. When Washington finds out that not only can we view the past but we can also, in some curious way, penetrate it, he insists on being sent back to a few hours before the explosion to see if he can prevent it. (The usual paradox is mentioned in passing, as a joke.) BANG -- and Washington is sent back to a few hours before the blast, and after his Terminator-like trip he immediately rescues the drop-dead gorgeous Paula Patton from certain incineration by the terrorist. He does more than that. He saves the drop-dead gorgeous Paula Patton a second time. He saves the ferry by sacrificing his own life. Or so it would seem, except that he unknowingly shows up at the post-disaster scene, his unknowing "present" self, where he is introduced for the first time to the drop-dead gorgeous Pamela Patton. I don't know how that works either. If you died in the past, how can you show up alive in the present? For that matter, if your satellite technology can pick up the visual spectrum in the electromagnetic field, plus infra red, how come it can also give you high-definition audio, which is nothing more than waves of differing air pressure? Actually, I happen to know all these answers but the NSA won't let me spill the beans.
Denzel Washington is quite good in this most action movie. He doesn't have much in the way of dynamic range but that's okay. Neither did Gary Cooper or Robert Redford. What more can be said about the drop-dead gorgeous Paula Patton except that she has a slinky, sinewy figure and the face of a model, full of good bone structure. And she has a distinctive husky voice too. Her features are slightly, engagingly, askew, as if someone had sliced her face through the sagittal plane and put it back together somewhat carelessly. She's African-American, I suppose, because we all agree that she is. But genetically my guess is that she's about half Caucasian, like Barak Obama and Hallie Berry. A living example of what's called "the social construction of reality." She's a decent actress and one hopes she has a career in films, and not just because she's, well, drop-dead gorgeous either.
The director, Tony Scott, deserves a comment too. He's done some meretricious work in the past, undeserving of much attention, but this (with one or two exceptional scenes) is nicely executed material. There's a bit too much editorial razzle dazzle in the expository scenes involving the satellites, but that's about it. The action scenes, the special effects, are above what you might expect from a routine action movie. Sometimes they're startling. I hope the stunt people were being paid above scale.
This is a film that ought to keep you attentive and in your seat, even if you're not an action movie fan. It's a superior example of a much degraded genre.