It's also preposterous, even by the standards of the pulpiest speculative fiction. After Doug retrieves that crucial speck of evidence, which he delivers to the other shocked and awed law enforcement types working the case, he uncovers far more attractive evidence in the form of an apparent bomb victim, Claire (Paula Patton). For the unattached and all-but-friendless agent, the dead woman, who looks good even when stretched out on an autopsy table, becomes the key that unlocks the case and his heart. Like the detective in Otto Preminger's classic film noir Laura who falls for a woman he knows only through a portrait and other traces, Doug falls hard, though without the benefit of some memorable David Raksin theme music to cushion him.
In Laura, the detective solves the case with hard work and shoe leather. Doug tackles his job with hardware and hooey, which means he gets to the bottom of things — or, rather, hops a ride back into the past on the space-time continuum with some help from Val Kilmer (as a federal agent), Adam Goldberg (as a genius), a yellow Hummer and a room stuffed with blinking machines and flat screens that make the image we're watching look remarkably like a big computer monitor with several open software windows. To top it off, Jim Caviezel even shows up wearing the same military jacket that Robert De Niro wore in Taxi Driver and spouting religious-sounding verse, adding a delirious soupcon of Mel Gibson-style passion to a film that has long lost its way.
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