The director Tony Scott began his career as an ad man, so it makes sense that his third Denzel Washington movie, “Déjà Vu” (the first two being 1995’s “Crimson Tide” and 2004’s “Man on Fire”), is an advertisement so compelling that it transforms current events into product endorsements. Terrorists attack America from inside and out, innocent people become collateral damage in the war on terror, Hurricane Katrina destroys New Orleans, and only one thing can save us: Tivo.

Denzel Washington is perfectly cast as Denzel Washington, a man who breaks into toothy grins when angry and who takes long, quirky pauses before he speaks his lines. Here Denzel (who, incidentally, plays a character named Doug Carlin) is a federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent investigating the bombing of a ferry in post-Katrina New Orleans. Assigned no actual duties, he’s free to follow his muse, uncovering blasting caps on the shore, explosive residue on the bottom of a nearby bridge, video footage of a mysterious witness, and a dead young woman who’s missing her fingers. Frankly, what the war on terror needs is less money spent on harbor security and more money spent cloning Denzel.

His knack for turning up puzzling new clues every five minutes catches the eye of Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer, looking puffy), who recruits him into an incredibly casual top-secret project that operates the greatest invention in our war on terror: the Time Tivo. This device can spy on anyone, anywhere in the world, four days and six hours in the past, and skip commercials.

Quickly realizing the potential of the Time Tivo to score dates, Denzel commandeers it to spy on the lovely Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), who senses that she is being watched and starts taking off her clothes as often as possible. Realizing that he’s found a woman who takes her clothes off a statistically improbable number of times, Denzel and head scientist Denny (Adam Goldberg) make her the focus of their investigation, assuming that whoever blew up the ferry will spy on her as well.

Denzel goads the scientists into faxing a message back in time. This not only ends in disaster, but in the disclosure that bad guy Carroll Oerstadt (Jim Caviezel) is a right-wing nut so desperate to fight in Iraq (we knew God was on our side!) that being rejected from the Army for being too patriotic has turned him into a mad bomber. Forget the fact that it’s highly unlikely the military would reject fresh recruits for any reason whatsoever, but what does blowing up a ferry have to do with the military?

Never mind. Because by now 10 minutes of screen time have passed and Denzel decides that he needs to Tivo himself back in time to sleep with Claire. Agent Pryzwarra tries to warn him of his folly, pointing out that if man could go back in time he would have traveled back long ago and told himself to stay away from sweets. But Denny helps Denzel use science to score. What follows are many scenes of Denzel demonstrating his keen understanding of his appeal to a key female demographic by frequently taking off his shirt, a very convoluted action scene on the ferry, and, what we all bought our tickets for, an explanation of what exactly déjà vu is.

We’ve all experienced déjà vu, and we all know it’s the annoying feeling that you’ve read this review before. But it’s not until the very end of “Déjà Vu” that we learn its true meaning: It’s the feeling you get when you’ve gone back to the past to alter the time stream in a top-secret government project and you manage to save many lives but you alter your going back in time out of existence and instead wind up in a parallel universe. See? It happens every day.