The statute of limitation on using Face/Off to defend John Woo has finally come to an end. I just want to make that entirely clear.
The conversations go like this:
Film Snob A doesn't want to see a new John Woo film and declares, "Since he started making American movies, everything John Woo has done has been trash."
Film Snob B responds, hopefully, "That's not true. What about Face/Off?"
Film Snob A concedes to some degree.
I've been Film Snob B on several occasions and I've used the Face/Off excuse to get friends to see Mission Impossible II, Windtalkers and now Paycheck. I don't have those friends anymore and I blame John Woo. Throw in the fleetingly interesting Broken Arrow and the "not-bad-for-a-Van-Damme-film," but otherwise poor Hard Target and you have a filmmaker who, it saddens me to say, isn't worthy of attention until he does something interesting again. If we didn't know that John Woo had made brilliant films in Hong Kong (though none in the past decade), we would think he was a hack who got lucky once.
Paycheck isn't an awful movie or anything (though it's kinda close). There are occasional moments of tension and thanks to the Phillip K. Dick source material, there are periodic moments of intellectual amusement. However, it's cheap-looking, ploddingly paced, ineptly edited and shockingly devoid of action style or inspiration. Yup. That's a John Woo film where the action choreography is bland and where the violence is dull rather than distinct and poetic.
Perhaps John Woo feels the pressure of being John Woo and accidentally took this film for, well, the paycheck. But even on autopilot, it's sad for me to imagine the director of Hard-Boiled, The Killer and A Better Tomorrow having this little to say.
This just isn't a John Woo movie and it sputters along without authorial vision. Sure, there are accidental cliches that look like they were pulled from Woo's playbook. There's at least one bird flying in slow-motion and there are at least two Mexican stand-offs and towards the end, there are some explosions with people flying in slow-motion to safety. Nobody dives around shooting two guns at once, but Woo can be forgiven for putting that gimmick on ice for a movie.
What's missing is Woo's sense of theme and romantic conviction. Even in his worst movies like last summer's World War 2 debacle Windtalkers, Woo found a way to bring out his typical notions of the masculinity and the dual nature of man. And it's not like Phillip K. Dick was an author prone to dodging big themes.
Paycheck feels as if it were written as a low-budget sci-fi lark, more like Imposter or Screamers on the Dick cinematic scope than a big budget epic like Blade Runner or Minority Report. On the page, it's clear that there's no reason at all for there to be any computer effects, any shootouts or any car chases. Take a second-tier star (say, Ethan Hawke) and you'd have a film that needn't cost a penny more than the surprisingly satisfying Gattaca. At that point, it's an intellectual puzzle movie, a movie about ideas.
Once you get John Woo involved and you bring in Ben Affleck and DreamWorks ponies up a few bucks, suddenly it can't just be a movie about ideas, it has to be a movie about John Woo and Ben Affleck. On the earlier, low-pressure level, there's no reason why Paycheck couldn't have worked. As it is, though, the film has box office disaster written all over it. It's a not-so-smart puzzle thriller surrounded by poor futuristic effects and lazy stunts. It's hard to imagine who exactly will walk away feeling satisfied by this movie.
Affleck plays Michael Jennings, a techno-thief. Officially, he's a reverse engineer. He takes other people's work and finds ways around the proprietary technology to steal the ideas. He's paid handsomely for his work, but for reasons that don't make a lick of sense to me, he gets his memory erased at the end of every job.
On the bright side, this means he really only remembers his vacations and he has no memories of boring nights on the job. That's a plus, I guess. What kind of man, though, would take a job like this? This has to be a reason why a brilliant engineer like Jennings would prefer to go through life stealing other people's ideas and having his brain constantly tinkered with as opposed to just making things and making money. In, say, a 9-page short story, we don't need to understand the psychological profile that would make a man live his life like this. In a two-hour film, we kinda do. Or we should. Instead, it's ignored that this man would have to either be pathologically antisocial or more-than-a-little eccentric to want to do this to himself. Nope. None of that.
So Jennings goes through life blissfully happy. His friend, sensei and brain-scrubber is played by Paul Giamatti in a part that you sense may not have ever had any lines to begin with.
Jennings is given the chance to do an extended gig in exchange for tens of millions worth of stock options in a company run by Aaron Eckhart's Rethrick. Jennings should know something is up. He's being asked to give up 3 years of his life, plus, when Rethrick invited him over, he enclosed a newspaper clipping with a typo in its headline (no, this isn't a plot point, this is me wondering why people are morons and don't notice typos. I make typos, but they're really small on my screen. This one was blown up 10 feet-tall somewhere and nobody noticed).
Anyway, It's three years later. Jennings remembers nothing and when he goes to pick up his stock options, he discovers that he's given up his money in exchange for an envelope containing 20 clues. Clues to what? Dum dum dum. The future.
I don't want to give away any of the fun of what those clues help him do. The movie's best five or ten minutes come as Jennings slowly begins to understand the contents of the envelope. Once he actually begins to get it, the fun is done.
Oh and Uma Thurman's around as a biologist who becomes close to Jennings during his missing three years.
Thurman's part actually doesn't make a lick of sense, not that anybody cares. I mean, for heavens sakes, Jennings is working on something so top secret for the company that his memory will be erased and the government (personified by Joe Morton and Michael C. Hall) wants to track him down and that people want him dead and yet the company allows him to have a close affair with a co-worker? Yes, they have her house under surveillance, but why run the risk? And why ask Jennings to empty his pockets when he enters on the first day, if he's just being allowed to enter and exit every day for three years. Does he empty his pockets every single day? He must loose a lot of fruity sunglasses that way. Regardless, it's well established that Jennings' routine on previous jobs was to work 20 hours a day until completion. How were things casual enough on this job for him to enter into a three year relationship? It's just idiotic.
Sorry. Did I go off on a tangent there?
So yeah, this is one of those "Is the future set in stone or if we know about the future can we change it?" kinda movies. Actually, it's the kinda movie that throws around words like "fate" but never explores any concepts. Once we accept that you can see the future using a big laser (and a big tacky machine), there aren't any more intellectual concerns about changing the future that seem to matter, which I can only assume is a blatant misreading of the Dick short story. The source story for Minority Report and the film adaptation are very skeptical about the efficacy of seeing into the future and trying to change your own destiny. In Minority Report, changing the future is a very complicated thing that all too often leads you to loop back on yourself, but in Paycheck it's a breeze. You see the future. You throw trinkets in an envelope. The world is, to some degree, your oyster. It's not giving anything away to say that the future is so darned set in stone that everything in that envelope has a purpose, right up to the last object. You'd think that after tampering with certain parts of the future, chaos theory would dictate that you would mess up other variables and that at least something would change. Nope. The future is an easily contained system, so it's probably a good thing we can't see it.
And maybe it's better that nothing in Paycheck is as complicated as it could be. I'm not sure that Affleck's tightly wound face could have taken too much concentration. Never has the oft-wooden actor seemed quite so much like a mannequin. With his skin preternaturally tanned, his hair impossibly gelled, and his chin improbably jutting, Affleck could be playing the first mouth-breathing robot in cinema history.
Affleck, an actor who I respect more than a lot of critics do, adds absolutely nothing to this movie. That's probably not good for a high-profile leading man. He seems uncomfortable running, illogical fighting and just flat-out ludicrous whenever he's supposed to seem intelligent. I found myself constantly thinking that in a different world, Giamatti would be playing Jennings. That's an actor I'd buy in what is an archetypal Hitchcockian "ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances." Instead, Affleck is an ordinary movie star in a less-than-ordinary movie.
As a man who has starred in Phantoms, Affleck isn't likely to do "career worst" work any time in the near future, but he's not far off here.
Looking at how Matt-n-Ben are spending their holiday movie season (this and Stuck on You) they may really want to head off to a writer's colony to draft that Good Will Hunting follow-up (or at least Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season).
All too much of the movie, though, is based on Affleck's implausible engineer. None of the rest of the actors had anything to do and I mean that literally. Because Jennings sent himself everything he needed in an envelope and because the future is, apparently, very easy to program, none of the other characters have a sense of purpose. Hall and Morton, very fine actors, are particularly useless as the government agents who may, in fact, have Jennings' best interests at heart. Then again, we know that Morton will eventually engineer a cyborg that will help destroy much of humanity. Or, wait, wasn't that prevented? But wait, didn't the robots take over anyway? There's no point in dealing with the much more perplexing ways of tinkering with the future in the Terminator movies.
Eckhart and Thurman are both actors who require very careful handling to be effective. Eckhart suffers when he isn't working with Neil LaBute and Thurman suffers when Quentin Tarantino isn't around. It's no surprise, then, that neither has much impact on this movie. At least 50 different actors and actresses could have played these two parts and nobody ever would have noticed the difference or cared.
And, alas, at least 50 different directors could have directed Paycheck and it wouldn't have been either better or worse. Peter Hyams? Richard Donner? Simon West? Choose your hack action director of choice and Paycheck would have failed, just in a slightly different way.
It's clear that Woo doesn't know what he's doing almost from the beginning. We're only 35 minutes in when Woo starts inserting brief flashbacks to scenes that we saw minutes earlier. It's all just filler. There's a chase on a motorcycle that just wreaks of studio interference. It's 10 minutes of swerving, crashing and driving against traffic and it couldn't feel more out of place unless it were the tacked on fifteen minute speedboat chase at the end of Face/Off that that film's detractors often cite as proof that Woo has no concept of when enough is enough. There's no logic for making Affleck's character into an action hero, but Woo is forced to try anyway. There's an absurd scene where he trains at bashing things with a pole. Why is he doing this? So that we don't laugh later when, for no reason, he has to apply that training. I laughed anyway. Sorry, John.
The film has no real sense of time. In what year does it begin? How does technology evolve? Why doesn't Affleck have the slightest trouble or confusion with the new world in which he finds himself after three years? And, perhaps most confusingly, when Affleck decides to hide out in an apartment in a flophouse with a flashing neon sign, why is there suddenly a high school directly across the street two scenes later? Surely, there have to be some zoning concerns?
I really could go on. I could complain about the boring art direction. I could complain about John Powell's jarring score. I could ponder why a CEO of a major technology company would shoot up billions of dollars worth of outside research just to get Ben Affleck.
It wouldn't matter. This is a 1.5 star out of 5 bomb and I doubt that there's any kind of audience for it anyway.
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