The best bits come when Washington is still in the here and now, zooming merrily along in a Humvee using a special portable virtual-reality scanner clamped to one eye to track the killer's past movements, driving along this same highway four days previously.
As in Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate, the film paradoxically feels more comfortable with a white American in the terrorist-villain role, rather than an alienated Arab or Muslim: an approach that avoids ethnic offence and even appears daringly liberal, but actually implies that only Americans are equal to the task of successfully attacking other Americans. We find out early on that the terrorist culprit is an American, played by Jim Caviezel, an ultra-patriot extremist nut. After an awful, plasma-screen-smashing row about the ethics of the whole business, the scientists are persuaded to let Washington hunch into their special pod, resembling the nosecone of Apollo 9, in which he can travel back in time, on a desperate mission to prevent the bombing and get jiggy with Claire in her pre-corpse state. Their invention is like one of those Sky+ gizmos that allows you to "freeze" live TV sports events while you make a cup of tea, and then lets you resume watching on a time-delay. Who was she? How did she fit in? Carlin is astonished to find that a top-secret team of funky boffins can help him: using Einsteinian know-how to bend time and watch events unfolding anywhere in the world, four days ago. Washington conceives for the spiffing stiff what I have to say is an unwholesome and necrophiliac tendresse. She is a drop dead gorgeous gal who has dropped dead. Washington's heart is melted by discovering the body of a beautiful woman called Claire (Paula Patton) who appears to have been separately killed by the terrorist before the bombing took place.
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