Requires you to park your reason, along with your car, outside the theater. A ferry boat blows up in post-Katrina New Orleans, killing 543, mainly returning Navy men and their welcoming families; and the uncounted body of a young woman bearing residue from the explosion has been fished out of the water a few minutes before the blast. What's the connection? The chief investigative tool proves to be a fanciful science-fictional device that allows the feds, through satellite imagery and computer projections, to view events from four days and six hours earlier, even inside the apartment (and the bathroom shower) of the deceased young woman: an audiovisual time machine. In addition, a portable-headset version of the device facilitates a truly unique car chase, in the lengthy annals of car chases on screen, whereby one vehicle is four days ahead of the other, which has to steer through a totally different pattern of traffic to keep pace. The bag-of-tricks filmmaking technique of Tony Scott, really more of a weathercock than a director, throws a few smaller obstacles in your path. Still, if you consent to ride out the bumps, the film works up plenty of forward momentum and climactic tension (en route to a have-it-both-ways ending); and the preposterousness in no way limits the level of engagement, or engagingness, of Denzel Washington. With Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, James Caviezel. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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