Paycheck - Taxes Withheld

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Nathan and I were each disappointed with Paycheck, but for opposite reasons. Parts of it went over his head, and I thought parts of it went over their heads.

The premise of the movie, as given away by the trailers, is that Ben Affleck's character agreed to have his memory of his work on a top-secret tech project wiped afterward, so he's surprised to discover that just before the wipe, he signed papers giving up the $90 million paycheck he was supposed to get, and instead just got an envelope of seemingly ordinary items. The items were the clues he'd need to piece together something (obviously important) he'd "forgotten", and giving up the paycheck had been the only way to make him pay attention to these items.

What the trailer doesn't tell you (because this is a spoiler, so stop reading now if you'd rather not know) is that the envelope of stuff doesn't exactly contain clues. The items are instead precisely the things he'll need to get out of one tight spot after another, as the Bad Guys try to track him down and kill him before he remembers the truth. Because, you see, the top-secret project was a technique for seeing the future, and Affleck was able to foresee what those tough spots would be, and smuggle himself the keys (sometimes literally) to get out of them. Which A) strains credibility a bit, because it requires that each of these life-threatening situations has a simple solution that revolves around having an ordinary item handy (e.g. a paperclip to short out a computer with), and Affleck figuring out that solution at the right time, and B) reduces the plot to a series of deus ex machina escapes. Didn't Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure use the same trick, when the dudes went back in time to plant the key to one of their escapes on the scene?

I'll admit that I haven't read the Philip K. Dick short story this is based on, but it doesn't seem like they used much of it beyond the warning-message-to-myself bit. There are a few scenes where the actors very briefly summarise the negative philosophical ramifications of this technology they've stumbled across, which seems like they got it from Dick. But the bulk of the movie is a bunch of action scenes, which are generally well-done... but each of them undermined by the MacGyver ex machina angle. The romance with Uma Thurman seems like an afterthought, because it doesn't really seem believable that these two ever fell in love, let alone that they'd be able to rekindle the relationship after he forgets all about her.

Paycheck could have been a clever and thoughtful sci-fi story with some exciting action added, but after Hollywood's idea taxes were withheld, the take-home pay really wasn't worth my time.