Source: New York Times

The dead have just started to be stacked up on the pier when Mr. Washington rolls up as Doug Carlin, an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Graced with almost uncanny powers of detection, Doug is the kind of investigator who sniffs the air, sifts the earth and all but walks on water to determine who did what, where, when and why. Standing on the banks of the Mississippi amid the carefully scattered wreckage, not a severed body part in view, he zeroes in on a speck of evidence that would have led straight to the killer if the credited screenwriters, Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, hadn’t decided to kink up their terrorism plot with a beautiful dead woman and some nutty speculative fiction.

Fantasists of a specific Hollywood kind, Mr. Bruckheimer and Mr. Scott rarely traffic in reality, even when they seem to want to. “Déjà Vu” is more removed from reality than most of their collaborations, which makes their exploitation of Sept. 11, Katrina and Oklahoma City (which earns a couple of vague mentions) less offensive than it might in a film that bore some relation to the real world. Yet “Déjà Vu” is so wildly divorced from the here and the now of contemporary politics, policy and people that it’s impossible to get worked up by its invocation of these three calamities, though a throwaway shot of a decimated New Orleans neighborhood used purely for some atmospheric flavoring is certainly vulgar in the extreme.

Well damn, I was really looking forward to this one.