‘Paycheck’ is just the sort of movie that, to channel John Cleese (or Basil Fawlty), makes me want to give the screenwriter a damn good thrashing. Unfortunately, I can’t find it in me to do it in this case. I’d hate to be overly harsh on Dean Georgaris, especially when it’s so difficult to pinpoint what might be his fault. I suspect that Georgaris, having only ‘Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life’ to his credit before this (he has since added the well-received ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) was given rather a quick deadline. Worse still, I further suspect John Woo of doing whatever the hell he wanted with the whole thing in any case. Put a rush job on translating and updating a Phillip K. Dick story together with John ‘Everything Will Blow-Up Or I’m Not Doing It’ Woo, and your movie doesn’t stand much chance.

Despite the long odds, ‘Paycheck’ had me hooked for about the first forty-five minutes. It had transformed Dick’s tight, surprisingly smart brain-teaser into little more than an excuse for a chase, but I’d seen the trailer (and knew Ben Affleck was in it), and that’s pretty much the deal I’d made by seeing it at all. It was rough and basic, but it was doing it’s job. Then the movie hit the same wall as virtually every other movie based on Dick’s work - the people making the movie took Dick’s story and figured they had a better idea. It’s not so much the audacity that becomes irritating as the movie progresses, it’s the incomprehension.

Ben Affleck is Michael Jennings, a genius reverse engineer who hires himself out to tech companies so that he can take apart competitor products and copy or improve on them. Apparently as part of the deal he makes with such companies, he has his memory erased upon completion of each job. His friend Shorty (the always wonderful, and here wasted Paul Giammati) works the memory erase controls which render Jennings unaware of anything he did for his employers.

Our introduction to the film is by way of a quick trip through a standard job, and we soon move on to the hook that becomes the plot. Jennings gets a new offer, and it’s a supremely big job. A certain company wants Jennings for three years (his standard contract is two months), but they’re going to make it worth his while by way of stock in the company. A bit of whizbang later, and we find Jennings at the end of his contract with his memory erased. He checks the value of what he ought to get for the job, and finds he’s just shy of $100 million to the good. At least, until he tries to get his money. He then finds that he’s signed away his stock in exchange for 20 seemingly-meaningless items in an envelope he’s sent himself. He naturally becomes enraged, but he doesn’t have time to go into a thorough tantrum, because the government shows up to arrest him. Shift to the interrogation, and he learns that he’s been doing work with a former government scientist, and what he’s been doing basically amounts to stealing classified information. He manages to escape, and then escape... more, by using three of the items in his envelope, and the chase is on.

It doesn’t sound bad on paper, and that’s how we get through about half of the movie entertained and not overly disappointed. Ben Affleck certainly isn’t doing great work, but he’s doing pretty passable ‘action vehicle’ work. Uma Thurman is slightly less interesting as Jenning’s further confusion - the woman he fell in love with, but doesn’t remember now. Things really fall apart for three reasons. I’ve mentioned John Woo and his ‘Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever’-esque confusion about what makes a good action movie. To that we add an incredibly juvenile attitude toward foreshadowing, and the movie’s pace stumbles that try and slow down to think about things. Foreshadowing problems are a particularly odd brand of complaint for the film, especially since ‘Foreshadowing’ might as well be the title. The problem here is that if everything that happens is foreshadowing, even in this story, then nothing is. Put Woo together with overexplanatory visual detailing, and the hope of the movie rests in running headlong as fast as possible, starting about ten minutes after the beginning of the movie and ending about ten minutes after it’s over. ‘Paycheck’ deserves to be made into a movie where we sit around and think a lot, but this isn’t the combination of screenplay, director, and actors that can turn itself into that version. This is the version that needs to just drag you along like mad, and hope to slip a few things in you can think about later.

By the time we get to the half-way point, the ‘items’ have the exact opposite effect we’d hope for. Instead of being interested in the complexities of some one small item greatly altering a person’s life, and the double marvel of having seen the future, but not remembering it, we are eventually all but bored and can only focus on the knowledge that Jennings is obviously going to get out of any scrape he has thrown at him. Instead of being drawn into the intellectual possibilities, we come to feel somehow as though we missed the cheat that is now dawning on us. After all, the movie pretty well tells us at the beginning that things can’t go wrong. We missed that at first, and the result was a fairly good time, because the movie wasn’t slowing down long enough for us to really work it all out (even if we’d read the source material). But then we put on the brakes for a good stretch before entering the third act, and we start to wonder about emperors and fashion sense. As the best example of the cheat and incomprehension we missed, the cigarettes don’t actually make sense to the internal puzzle. It doesn’t matter at that early stage, because the movie is still on legs like pumping pistons and it’s all ‘fun action vehicle ride’. If we’d have kept up that pace, it wouldn’t have mattered at all, but when the movie thinks it’s clever enough to ask us to think about things, such misuses of the source material tear us out of the adventure.

The most disappointing aspect of the movie’s failure is that it seems so much a result of either Woo’s stupidity, or his assumption of yours. If only enough things blow-up, and there’s enough flash and shiny stuff, the movie seems to be saying, you’ll be as impressed as your able to be anyway.

Still, the harshness of the reaction is a result of the potential, and even near miss, of the movie’s general plot and structure. This is by no means a complete waste, and given the right sort of expectations I don’t think anyone could be too disappointed. For an action movie to kill a bit of time with while being more or less solidly entertained, this is a pretty good choice. Just try not to think about it too much.


Recommended:
Yes