I kind of wish Deja Vu didn’t have anything to do with time travel. Sure, before that particular element is introduced the movie is just a cop drama. But it is a cop drama with unusually good characters, dialogue, acting and directing. It isn’t ground breaking, but it works, it keeps you interested. The rest of the movie, not so much.

The device used for time traveling in the movie is actually very clever, and different from any other device I have seen before. And I could totally see a very good Sci-Fi channel series being developed around it. But here it’s introduction instantly breaks the grittiness and sense of reality the movie managed to establish before. And the rest of the film becomes too concerned with plot and the mechanics of time, in detriment of building either the characters or the tension.

A good example of how the whole time travel thing affects the movie negatively is the two big exposition scenes, in which the characters explain how time travelling works and what you can or can’t do with it. They try very hard to make these scenes interesting by having the characters heatedly fight with one another. But they are not interesting. Necessary, since we otherwise wouldn’t understand what was going on, but nevertheless boring and clunky. These scenes have been obviously added for the purposes of enlightening the audience, an they take us away from whatever was happening in the film.

The movie is still probably worth seeing in a lazy afternoon. Like I said, the time travelling device is clever. There are some good scenes throughout the movie, including a very interesting chase sequence which uses the time travelling device to great effect. And the film is never bad. It’s just not very engaging for the most part.