Still, however predictable Deja Vu is, and however packed it comes with red herrings and dropped plot points, Scott's film is what it is: escapism. Denzel Washington is back as the black Harrison Ford who will go through hell (inevitably shot, but quickly patched up for more action) to see that justice is done.

At the suggestion of FBI Agent Pryzwarra (a well-fed Val Kilmer), Carlin is asked to join forces with that agency, and is led into a secret warehouse where government-funded geeks work at their new toys. The most astonishing piece of their cutting-edge technology is their highly sophisticated satellite surveillance cameras that can penetrate walls to view private actions.

Carlin may lack a scientific background (or at least a degree in technoblather), but he knows when he's not being told the whole story. As he comes to find out, the new technology is actually a way to span time by creating a wormhole, or vortex fold, or top-secret trap door. Mooning over the spied-upon past images of Claire (much as Dana Andrews' Mark McPherson became possessed by the portrait of Laura in Otto Preminger's film), Carlin decides to try and save the day ... though that day was four days ago.

There follows the usual succession of car chases, car crashes, shootouts and explosions, so many of the latter that you almost hear the voices of Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, from the old SCTV sketch "Farm Report," marveling that everything was "blowed up real good." In fact, in his rush to the past to save one woman, Washington blithely commits vehicular manslaughter in a tanklike Hummer, though this indiscretion is never commented upon afterward. The power of love, you see.

That we are asked again by Scott and his ilk to assign our sympathies to a Fed goon is one thing. That surveillance cameras save the day is something quite different, and there is nothing in the script that even questions the morality of such intrusion. There's also the continuing intrusion of Fox News shots throughout the film, in one of the more vomitive recent examples of product placement.

Washington is his usual winning self, though you hope that someday he will realize there's enough money in the bank to return to making more intelligent films. Kilmer seems to have become the budget office's Alec Baldwin, a former heartthrob gone to seed who can still lend gravitas to the supporting roles. Jim Caviezel forsakes his native Aramaic to give us a dead-eyed American patriot who is compelled to help Armageddon along with a few homemade bombs (maybe we really do need those surveillance cameras).