This is yet another film in which Denzel Washington is playing a law-and-order character (Detective Keith Frazier in “Inside Man (2006)”; dirty cop Alonzo Harris in “Training Day (2001)”; and gumshoe Easy Rawlins in “Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)”).
This time he is a sunny side up ATF agent who gets into a deep trouble that involves parallel universes and painful time travel!
Tony Scott needs no introduction as a director. He again directed Denzel in a similar role in “Man on Fire (2004)”. His action-thriller skills and credentials are beyond question.
So this is another fantastic Scott juggernaut with a little catch – the plot does not make total sense. The penultimate scene puts Denzel in a place from where there should have been no coming back, with or without time travel. But, hey, that’s Hollywood…
The film starts with a mega bang when a ferry boat in New Orleans chartered to carry over five hundred U.S. sailors explodes in a mother of all fireballs. Carnage. Terrorism. Chaos. Underwater shots of cars and trucks and bodies plunging into the water after they are catapulted high up into the sky. Reminded me of similar shots in the opening scenes of “Saving Private Ryan”.
The whole film is held together by our belief in this hi-tech government laser-beam-and-satellites hocus-pocus contraption that can re-constitute the multi-media record of everything that have happened 4 days ago in 3-D, tracking forward towards the present with an exact 4 day lag.
Thus when Denzel identifies the ferryboat bomber who has previously killed his partner, he arranges himself transported to 4 days earlier, to an “earlier version of reality.” The goal of this desperate clock-ticking attempt is to change the past in order to save the hundreds of sailors who have already died in the present-day universe.
There is also a subplot involving saving the gorgeous “love interest” played by beautiful Paula Patton who is also already dead “today”.
There are just too many people that need to be saved in this movie by beaming to the past but not enough seconds in a day. By the time Denzel manages to save them all he runs out of time to save himself. Or does he?…
We’re talking about time travel and an amazing contraption that can make anything possible. Suspend your disbelief and you can perhaps save most of the holes in this plot as well.
