“Ghost” meets “CSI” meets 9/11-survivor grief in the post-Katrina New Orleans of Tony Scott’s “Déjà Vu,” produced with Jerry Bruckheimer gusto and shot by Paul Cameron (“Man on Fire”). “Déjà Vu” is a jaw-dropper in a good way, and—no!—not because you’ve seen it before, but because Scott and screenwriters Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio have the daring and valor to go gonzo on the story’s most exotic turns. Book-ended by the Beach Boy’s sunny yet strangely sad-sounding “Don’t Worry Baby,” Scott’s latest eye-pleasing exercise in strategic visual excess opens with a bomb destroying a New Orleans ferry with almost 600 people on board. (Shot after Katrina, the end credits read “The film is dedicated to the strength and enduring spirit of the people of New Orleans.”) Denzel Washington is the local who can help the feds, but he figures a new turn in the story when a woman’s body washes up, patently a victim of the explosion yet who died two hours before the tragedy. (Portentously, her name is Claire; she’s played by Paula Patton.) The Feds, it turns out, include Val Kilmer and Bruce Greenwood, but also a younger generation (including Elden Henson and Adam Goldberg) who, well, have several trailers of equipment that allows them to, ah, work with “the very fabric of space and time,” as the press kit neatly summarizes. Slickness a few microns shy of risible Michael Mann-erisms, in love with terms of art like “wormholes” and “Einstein-Rosen bridges,” this strange yet assured movie delves into String Theory, parallel universes and fearsomely powerful surveillance that uses terabytes of tech so complex that it can short the electrical grid (and is credited for the Northeast blackout of several winters ago). Adam Goldberg is particularly fun with his extended explanations of what the hell is going on. Scott’s visual style is cleaner than in the manic “Domino,” yet his work is still bold and painterly. There are echoes of Philip K. Dick and the “pre-crimes” of the Dick adaptation, “Minority Report.” “All my career I’ve been trying to catch people after they do something horrible,” Washington says. “For once in my life I’d like to catch somebody before they do something horrible. All right?” Glimpses of the still-rotting wreckage of ruined wards anchor the flights of fancy. (Night shooting, like President Bush’s brief public-relations appearance, required an enormous amount of extra lighting to bring the New Orleans skyline to its former glow.) While dabbling in physics and time, “Déjà Vu” has much more satisfying solutions to the perplexes than the well-dressed but airless “Lake House,” and the layers-upon-layers of the glimpses backwards into time, including a wall screen with seventy-two tiles of surveillance imagery, are dense with information yet a gorgeous visualization of the tangled web we’ve woven when we practice to observe. To describe more would diminish its pleasant pop surprise. Super 35mm 2.35 widescreen; the integration of HD video impresses as well. 128m. (Ray Pride)
