The Do-Over is an MRA wet dream in which Sandler and Spade justify grossly misogynist posturing with cheap twists and plot turns, firing a flare gun at women in bikinis for laughing at their junk (after flashing their breasts), and worse. And Patton, the nice lady whose dead husband’s identity Spade’s dorky bank manager has unwittingly taken over, finds herself more than anyone else subjected to one degrading line after another. Every single female character is oversexed, shrewish, or secretly scheming against them. That’s the Adam Sandler version of a meet cute in a movie in which two middle-aged men are emboldened to act out their horny douchebag fantasies for two hours because their shitty lives, and the women in them, owe them that much. When she does, finding herself in the sights of Sandler and Spade’s amateur con men in the middle of a terminally convoluted plot that only gets exponentially dumber, the pair stalk her from afar, drooling over her physique before intentionally running her over with a Winnebago. It takes nearly 50 minutes for Patton to even show up in The Do-Over, the latest in Sandler’s four-picture Netflix film deal after The Ridiculous Six-a comedy so laden with offensive Native American caricatures that actors walked off the set in protest. This month, in addition to donning emerald skin and cumbersome fangs in the critically panned video game epic Warcraft, the actress finds herself in the unenviable position of being ogled, sexually objectified, physically attacked, and generally abused in a host of ugly ways as David Spade’s love interest in an Adam Sandler action-comedy. Her first film roles came in supporting turns in the 2005 Will Smith hit Hitch and ensemble coke party dramedy London, but within just a year she would made her film debut proper opposite Washington in Déjà Vu, months after playing her first leading lady role in the Outkast period musical Idlewild.įast-forward through a decade that’s seen little traction gained on the big screen for women-let alone women of color. The rest of the time it is, ironically, forgettable.Patton landed her first acting gigs at 28, getting a relatively late start for good reason: She’d gone to USC film school to start a career behind the camera, not in front of it. When there are boats to blow up, shoot-outs to stage or autos to demolish, "Deja Vu" shakes off its aura of pleasant-enough hackwork and delivers high-voltage thrills. Washington and Patton make an appealing pair, but Tony Scott movies are all about big stunt sequences. The film regains its moorings as an action-oriented whodunit when Jim Caviezel appears as a suspect with bizarre notions of patriotism and sacrifice. Soon he's insisting on an unauthorized, untested trip to the past to investigate the girl, foil the bomb plot and save his ideal.įor a film about time, "Deja Vu" is haphazardly paced, slack in some parts and overly frantic in others. His interest moves beyond the sentimental when he finds troubling connections between her and the bombing. Washington's gradual, skeptical acceptance that such a contraption could exist eases us over the same hurdle.Īs the investigator focuses on a bombing victim (Paula Patton), watching her move ever nearer the moment of her death, he develops a past-tense infatuation with the unattainable girl. Their view screens can look into the past, but there's only one chance to view events before they're gone forever. Shedding his usual dour demeanor, Washington plays a federal agent who is recruited by a supersecret surveillance program that needs his street smarts to narrow the focus of their investigation of the cataclysmic bombing of a New Orleans ferry. 'Deja Vu," a time-bending Denzel Washington police procedural, shamelessly borrows ideas, from Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and "Rear Window" to John Woo's "Paycheck" and Van Damme's "Time Cop." And if we include car-flipping highway crashes under the category of "ideas," director Tony Scott swipes a lot of moves out of his own playbook.
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