With the help of fellow agent Val Kilmer and a crack team of joystick-wielding technicians, Washington is able to track Patton via incredibly detailed surveillance footage from precisely four and a half days into the past. Assigned to investigate the case, ATF agent Denzel Washington focuses his attention on Paula Patton, the only victim who was dead before the bomb went off. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans-a locale the film exploits to nauseating effect-the film opens with a catastrophic river-ferry bombing that kills 500 people. Rarely have Bruckheimer and Scott been so upfront about insulting people's intelligence. Then it simply bends the space-time continuum like a soft pretzel. Déjà Vu first asks the audience to accept the possibility that extraordinarily detailed surveillance footage (with sound, no less!) can be captured through a confluence of multiple satellites.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott exploited this magical technology eight years ago with Enemy Of The State, a thriller that was like The Conversation for ADD sufferers, and they push it so far over the top in their new film Déjà Vu that the results are trashily enjoyable.

'Zoom in.' 'Okay, zoom in a little more.' 'Now enhance it.' And somehow, that mass of blurry pixels in the far corner of the shot becomes the killer's face, clear as a window. It's a cliché of modern action/suspense movies that surveillance footage, when examined by a bespectacled tech guy with a keyboard and a joystick, can reveal information well beyond its capability.

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