Paycheck
Has Ben Affleck's jaw ever looked more Superman square than it does in "Paycheck"?
He speeds through most of John Woo's playful but endless sci-fi thriller in a nice gray suit and crisp white shirt that he appears to be on the verge of ripping open to reveal the big yellow "S" stitched across his chest. Affleck plays Michael Jennings, an engineer who makes technology so innovative that when he's done the corporations for whom he consults delete from his memory the time he worked on these projects, then reward him handsomely. It's a money-for-time arrangement, insidious and literal.
The movie seems content with one magnificently geometric chin when a second arrives in the form of Aaron Eckhart, who plays a sinister suit of some kind. He offers Jennings a job that requires three years of work in exchange for $92 million in stock options. Offer accepted. The three years pass in a single scene, and Jennings's memory is successfully erased.
But instead of a big payday, Jennings finds out that he's forfeited all his dough in exchange for an envelope containing 20 mysterious objects -- among them a magnifying glass, an unfinished crossword puzzle, an engagement ring, and a fortune cookie, complete with lucky numbers on the back. He spends the rest of the movie, aided by Uma Thurman and Paul Giamatti, breathlessly trying to figure out what the objects mean.
After "Reindeer Games" and "Changing Lanes," Affleck appears to be the go-to guy for this sort of faceless and sweaty double-crossing action. He works hard but seems to be simultaneously taking all this too seriously and not seriously enough. He has that in common with Woo's movie, which Dean Georgaris adapted from a fun, portentous piece of Philip K. Dick short fiction.
The adaptation gets the basics right: Man must undo technological advance to stave off a catastrophic future shock of his own making. But the solution for "Paycheck" grinds the usual Woo-vian visual and formal tics into the solution: shattered glass that falls like rain, large pistols at the end of fully extended arms, slow-motion shoot-outs and smackdowns, and, that John Woo favorite, the salvation-signifying dove. All these motifs appear in the final scene, which is set in the biodome where Jennings spent his three lost years and where there are numerous gas canisters to create explosions sure to fatten up the run time. (The good news of the big finale is the almost erotic Affleck-Eckhart chin-off.)
Before "Paycheck" exasperates you with its director's odes to himself, Woo performs some entertaining Brian DePalma riffs (screen splits, fogged mirrors, and dangerous body doubles) and a hearty, if unsustainable, Hitchcock impersonation. He dotes on a pair of caged lovebirds ("The Birds") and paraphrases most of the best parts of "North by Northwest," with Affleck standing in for Cary Grant and Thurman, as the earth's most agile biologist, assuming the Eva Marie Saint position. See a tanned and Brylcreemed Affleck dive away from an oncoming subway a la Grant and that famous crop-duster.
Eventually, however, the homage's spell dissipates, and we're left with the painful reality that "Paycheck" might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.
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