Crashing Back To Reality

Watched Deja Vu on Sunday. I was right with them, even the whole time travel thing, up until Denzel gets shipped back 4-1/2 days. Fifteen, twenty minutes earlier they made a big deal of sending a piece of paper back. They said they had to keep the mass low and still the power requirements were so high that they blacked out the whole city of New Orleans doing it just as the paper was materializing. Everyone held their breath to see if the 3 x 5 scrap of paper successfully made the trip. How they manage to send back a 200lb man after struggling with the paper I just couldn’t believe.

I am usually happy to suspend my belief in reality for a good movie, but it seems lately that there is always a point in the movie that brings me crashing back. I’m betting there is a term for it in Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary, but the best I can come up now is “jumping the shark.”

When we watched National Treasure I was happily enjoying the trip when they bust into the vault under Independence Hall or wherever it was that has been sealed for 200 years and they flick a cigarette lighter to the torches lining the walls and they light right up and burn brightly for the rest of adventure. Come on. Our founding fathers must have purchased them from the same place as the Pharaohs of Egypt because every time an explorer find a mummy’s tomb, the torches in there light right up after millenniums.

It happened in The Astronaut Farmer too. I don’t remember exactly what did it, but it was sometime late in the movie. I mean I even bought the fact that launching a rocket through the roof of a barn wouldn’t incinerate the barn. But I was jarred into reality somewhere and ended up shaking my head in disbelief.

I don’t think it will happen in the 3rd Jason Bourne movie, but it is possible. I hope it doesn’t happen in the 3rd Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but it is probable.