Paycheck (2003)

The Age of Commercialism

Instant Favorite.

A Disappointing Continuation

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

"If you show someone their future, they have no future. " Kind of blows your mind huh? Well, that is what the basic plot of this movie does! The premise is, would you give up three years of your life, and all memories of those years, for almost 100 million dollars? What if you fell in love during that time? And what if you changed your mind about the money? And instead, traded it for an envelope of, well, stuff? Those questions, and more, are what Michael Jennings must deal with in this movie, and it makes for a pretty good plot and premise! Now, the short story that it is based on moves much quicker and feels like a tighter, better written version of this. But this movie is good, and though the action sequences could be much, much shorter, I think it stays pretty close to Philip K's tale. My only problem with this film is the editing. I think it gets pretty loose with the location of the characters, and twice I was completely dumbfounded as to where the characters were, even after I rewound to try to figure it out! It felt sloppy. But I liked the movie, even the cheesy ending!

Set in the near future "Paycheck" is a story about Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) a reverse engineer who is approached by his old college roommate "James Rethrick" (Aaron Eckhart) the CEO of the successful Seattle technology company Allcom. Cutting to the chase "Jennings" (Affleck) agrees to have his memory wiped to help the company with their project, we find out that this company are not what they seem."Paycheck" is interesting and it has a rare plot, this is a Science Fiction hi-tech thriller that has one action scene (a high speed car and motorbike chase, which is very entertaining). We see "Jennings" (Affleck) try to find out what is going on even though his memory has been wiped.It's a cat and mouse situation with the added "fight this company and take them down" scenario."Paycheck" is a pretty good flick, the only thing that is not right is the way the pet birds are portrayed, they're always in a tiny cage, i'm sorry but at least show a scene where they fly around the apartment so that they're not stuck in a cage, they have wings for a reason.

As the memory formation takes place, the structure of neuron changes. The part in the movie where (getting rid of certain memory) this is shown is brilliant. Although going through every neuron one by one, changing in multiple numbers (for ease) would have been better. A technology where this would be possible would be very difficult to obtain. In my opinion that's impossible. It may be for the factors like human rights.Yet the movie is better in generating thrill across ones spine.There's part where the movie plays dumb. The lottery ticket that's obtained . . .is obtained from a cage below the paper. It's very obvious that the birds would have made the paper dirty. A little better scripting could have been resulted in an even more awesome movie.

Ben Affleck gives a terrific performance in this adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story from director John Woo. The writing is outstanding, with a plausible science fiction scenario and sharp dialog that grabs the audience. Woo's direction is especially good. He builds the tension and suspense like a sculptor and he gets outstanding work from an excellent cast. It is Affleck who astounds in his role as the hapless schmo who does work for a mysterious corporation in exchange for a big paycheck but ends up facing some serious consequences. Affleck is a highly underrated actor of incredible depth and power and after this film his gifted artistry should be recognized.