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PAYCHECK
 
STARRING:
Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti Wolfe, Colm Feore
2003,
110 Minutes, Directed by John Woo
 Description:
An engineer (Ben Affleck, Chasing Amy) routinely agrees to have his memory
erased after every job so that he doesn't know what he's done. But after the
biggest job of his life, he discovers that not only has he refused a $90 million
paycheck, he's sent himself an envelope full of things he doesn't recognize--and
he doesn't remember doing any of this. As he unravels the plot, he discovers
he's also fallen in love (with Uma Thurman, Kill Bill) and invented a dangerous
device for his former boss (Aaron Eckhart, Erin Brockovich). —
Amazon.com
Paycheck has a lot going
for it: an intriguing premise provided courtesy of the legendary SF author
Philip K. Dick and is directed by the renowned John Woo. Unfortunately it also
has a leading man in Ben Affleck (Daredevil), one
of the blandest actors vying for Hollywood’s action movie crown now that
Harrison Ford is on pension.
Dick wrote the short stories
and novels that were the inspiration behind some of the better sci-fi action
movies to have come out of Hollywood, namely Blade
Runner, Minority Report and
Total Recall. Strangely, despite several of his works being adopted for the
big screen none of these movies can be properly described as being truly Dickian
(stop sniggering you).
His
works are idiosyncratic and offbeat; however, none of the movies based on his
material thus far has managed to capture the same paranoid and philosophical
qualities that made his work so unique. (Perhaps the upcoming A Scanner
Darkly adaptation directed by the Waking Life director and the
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter
utilizing the same
animation techniques employed in Waking Life will change this.)
Woo, of course, needs no
introduction: best-known for Hong Kong action movies such as the ultra-violent
Hard Boiled, his mega budget Hollywood output has so far been patchy
ranging from the likes of Mission Impossible 2 and Face/Off to
Broken Arrow and Hard Target.
So who will win out? The
dynamic director and source material or the bland leading star? The bland leading man I’m
afraid. Not that it is all Affleck’s fault. Woo is on autopilot turning
Paycheck into one long chase movie and the story will seem familiar to
anyone who has seen Total Recall or Minority Report.
Lately Hollywood has been
taking some good and interesting ideas and turning them into boring and
predictable movies (Underworld and League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen comes to mind). Paycheck continues this
depressing trend.
I’m sure some other critic
probably made a remark about the title being prophetic because everybody
involved in this uninspired action movie were there for . . . yes, the paycheck
. . . so I don’t even want to go there . . .
(Incidentally, did anyone else
notice the grammar mistakes made on the “headings” on the fake newspaper
clippings used in the movie?)
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