Paycheck

Paycheck has a cool if somewhat recycled premise: our protagonist (in this case, an engineer played by square-jawed Beniffer - I mean Ben Affleck) works on reverse-engineering projects and then has his memory wiped so that there's no evidence left behind. But then comes along the job of his life - a multimillion dollar deal that has one catch...he must lose three years of his memory.

So Michael Jennings (Affleck), who is a greedy bastard, takes the deal. A lot can happen in three years and of course, he manages to fall in love with the doctor (Uma Thurman) who he had a brief flirtation with at a party. He also worked on a top-secret project (it's spoiler time folks, so get ready)...

Jennings of course wants no part of the project so he has to send himself secret coded notes in the form of 20 generic, boring everyday items. Then he gives up all that money to "keep him focused on those 20 items."

The movie's plot is intriguing. The initial science of memory wiping seems plausible. Jennings brain must be kept at a certain temperature or he "turns into a vegetable" during a process where they literally zap brain cells away. You lose brain cells every day, so this isn't quite as awful as it sounds. Of course, one of the problems is that the guy who does the zapping sees on screen what Jennings saw. So should HE have to be zapped too? Shouldn't it be an automated process run by a machine or something?

There are a lot of plot holes like that, and once you go down that path the movie turns into a big, breezy pile of Swiss cheese. As I work for a Fortune 5 company myself, I know for a fact that if a highflying executive sold all his stock or gave up his shares, he'd be immediately called into an office to ask why. People don't just give up millions of dollars because they're having a bad day.

The second memory wipe is also plausible - they insert a tracer into Jennings and then, when the three years are up, follow back to the point of the tracer and chemically wipe his brain. Since it's a chemical process, it's an imperfect one and Jennings has dreams and nightmares of what he saw.

John Woo has an issue with pacing. It's obvious he wants to show off his martial arts filming techniques and there are plenty of opportunities for Jennings to do just that. But they drag on too long. Jennings is also a fantastic motorcyclist - bizarre, since Rachel (Thurman) tells him he's "only okay" on the bike. Then we're subjected to a 10-minute-too-long action sequence of Jennings and Rachel being chased by cop cars, bad guys, and multiple car explosions.

This happens again and again. The protagonists get into a tight spot and some of the time, Jennings McGyvers his way out. The rest of the time, he fights his way out. The engineer. Fighting his way out like a Marine.

There's no chemistry between Thurman and Affleck. I'm not sure how there could be. I'm so accustomed to seeing Uma in movies where she's a tough, pushy, almost manly character that seeing her in pink and giggling seemed extremely out of character. Affleck does a fair job of trying to be bewildered and compassionate at the same time, but nowhere is there any evidence of the incredible brilliance that Jennings used to create the device or negotiate his way through the future.

To sum up, Paycheck has all the twists of Total Recall but drags on its action sequences too long; it has all the mystery of Minority Report but not enough technical savvy to convince us it's a possible future; all the mind-bending antics of Memento but not enough carefully crated design to be a brilliant script, all the apocalyptic predictions of Terminator 3 but not the strength of its convictions to end the movie on a low note.