I am not a big fan of John Woo movies. But even those who are will be embarrassed by ‘Paycheck’.
The movie has a plot that is more or less similar to the Bourne Identity storyline. A bunch of goons want our hero dead, who in turn needs answers to keep himself alive. The whys and the hows get answered in the narrative. With a promising premise for an action thriller, Woo once again fails to deliver.
Michael Jennings (Ben Afleck) is a ‘reverse’ engineer. Top-notch companies hire him to recreate engineering designs from competing successful products. The pay is handsome, but there’s a catch. He will have to get his memory ‘wiped’ so that he won’t remember the technical details.
It is a cardinal rule for such ‘tech’ movies to have one successful demonstration of such a routine. Things can go wrong anytime, but not during the first attempt, otherwise the audience won’t understand the process. The first few scenes where we see Michael working to recreate a 3-D LCD Panel or whatever (does it matter?) and the subsequent ‘memory wipe’ scene will make a rocket scientist from the future drop his jaw. But Hey! it’s the future. Anything’s possible.
It turns out that our guy Mike accepts a three year assignment to develop something in return for a $100 million paycheck. At the end of the job and the memory wipe, he is astonished to find out that he has relinquished his paycheck and has instead mailed himself a set of personal items, none of which he can relate to.
Predictably, he gets into trouble with the FBI as soon as he is out. How he uses the items in the Manila cover as clues to free himself from the clutches of the law and the evil billionaire forms the rest of this insipid, intelligence-insulting excuse for a thriller.
I can see a lynch mob of John Woo fans already getting ready to attack me. But answer one of my questions before you pick up the stones.
One of the clues that Mike sends himself is an extra stamp on the envelope, which contains an A4 size sheet full of information that is visible under some special light. If Mike could have been successful in sending that much information out past security clearance, why then does he give himself clues and not answers?
For example, by looking into the future, presumably, he knows that he is going to be picked up by the FBI as soon as he leaves the bank. Why doesn’t he send himself a note to leave through the rear exit of the bank? Why instead does he send himself a cigarette that he is so sure will smoked by the FBI agent, so accurately under the smoke alarm of a non-smoking area, trigger off extinguishers, water jets, some inexplicable red smoke, which incidentally can be seen through if you wear the custom made ‘See-through-red-smoke cooling glasses’ that Mike finds in the envelope.
I enjoyed this movie up to a point, which was reached way earlier than the end of the movie. The plot looked very promising and had a lot of possibilities. But John Woo had to spoil it for us, and bore us to death with stupid chase sequences and stuff blowing up all over the place.
Lastly, I’ve completely forgotten to write about Uma Thurman. She’s that forgettable.