Déjà Vu (2006, USA)

I can’t even imagine the audience that Jerry Bruckheimer envisioned for this movie. Considering that it did so poorly at the box office that it didn’t recoup its budget, I hope he’ll think twice before executing yet another high-concept, low-brainpower action flick like this one (since he's Bruckheimer, he totally won't, but one can dream). Denzel Washington is utterly wasted in his role as a New Orleans ATF agent trying to solve the case of a Fat Tuesday ferry bombing (way to capitalize on location, in more ways than one). The rest of the cast, including Adam Goldberg, Val Kilmer, and (blink and you'll miss him!) Bruce Greenwood, doesn't fare much better, as most of the characters spend the majority of the running time staring at video screens. Seriously. It’s the action film equivalent of videoconferencing, and by the time Washington leaves the lab to save the girl and catch the bad guy, you’re way past caring. And I don’t even want to get started on the usual problems of a movie plot that deals heavily with time-travel. Even at their best (Terminator 2, Primer), time-travel movies that aren’t farce are riddled with issues, especially if the purpose of said time-travel is to go back into the past to change something. Anyone who’s halfway paying attention can come up with several major objections to the dénouement of Déjà Vu without even getting into the creepiness of voyeurism as the next hot way to pick up a date.