Deja Vu

An ATF agent (Denzel Washington) investigating the murder of a woman, and its apparent connection to the bombing of a New Orleans ferry, finds himself in unfamiliar territory when one of the top-secret investigative tools seems to look an awful lot like some kind of time travel. Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio’s tantalizing script is a sort of science-fiction riff on the old noir classic Laura, where a detective falls in love with a dead woman (here, Paula Patton) while trying to find her murderer. The script has a loose end or two (always a risk with time-paradox tales), and director Tony Scott, as usual, makes everything look like an SUV commercial. But Scott and his actors (others include Val Kilmer, Adam Goldberg and Jim Caviezel) respond nicely to the intelligent tension in the script.