It says 2021 in Amazon - why would I think that was wrong? So when they start talking about recent Hurricane Katrina damage, and people are carrying really old electronics I immediately think this movie is going to have a time skip, or time travel. The confusion started even earlier with the sailors, dressed in mid 20th century uniforms (I think, they look a little too old timey) getting out of mid 20th century buses. More confusion as they show the cars getting on the ferry, that seem to be mostly from the 70s and 80s.
I'm watching details closely, because I suspect we'll be back here again soon or multiple times, or maybe there's some other time shenanigans taking place, like maybe a Groundhog's Day scenario that the main character will need to break out of or use to solve a mystery.
* spoilers *
As suspected from the title and the curious directorial attention on some things, there is some time travel, but not much. This whole movie takes place over 4 days in 2006.
The biggest "Deja Vu" of this movie is that I already saw it in the form of Source Code from 2011. But I thought this movie was made recently, and that it was copying Source Code. That it is the other way around doesn't really change anything. This is a template. I wonder if tvtropes has a name for it...
Let's see, we're looking for a genre which is an investigation of real world criminal activity, but using some kind of fantasy shortcut, that pretends to be sci-fi using a bit of handwaving, to make it ever so slightly plausible in our world.
I had higher hopes, raised by the impression that this movie might span several decades. Denzel carries the movie, and the rest of the acting and production seem to at least take it fairly seriously - until the very end of the movie, where the actors just seem to be smiling and laughing at the whole premise, seemingly remembering things they shouldn't know and otherwise acting out of character. Up until then, its entertaining enough.
After movie thoughts... there's no way a government would let technology like this be used for something as mundane as solving crimes. This is an intelligence gathering device that your enemy has no defense against. This is bigger than nuclear weapons.
More after movie thoughts... every now and then the camera would suddenly zoom in on someone's face. I can't even guess what effect they were going for, and the director should be embarrassed, but nothing beats the the raw cringe of the end. At the very end, when the movie is obviously over but the cameras are still running for some reason, and the actors are still acting, and people are having deja vu's about timeliness they shouldn't be aware of, they decide to just finally stop on a freeze frame side profile of Denzel's face in mid-laugh.
