Paycheck

December 10, 2004

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 110 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Paycheck is a Christmas 2003 season release based on a Phillip K. Dick novel. With famed action director John Woo paired up with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman, and a Christmas Day release, this was intended to be a “big” movie. It has all of the ingredients, but it comes up a little flat. But hey, it’s better than Reindeer Games!

Affleck plays Michael Jennings, an engineering whiz who specializes in reverse engineering. Companies hire Jennings to reverse engineer competitors products and come up with a clone. To dodge legal issues, Jennings memory is erased after each project, so he honestly knows absolutely nothing about what he’s done.

He’s making good money and is quite happy with this arrangement until he wakes up from a 3 year assignment for a big conglomerate only to find there’s no money and people are trying to kill him. All he has is a bag full of small personal items he left himself as a clue to what happened and how to get out of the mess. This is a great premise and although the movie is entertaining, it somehow just comes up a bit short of expectations.

John Woo directs, and he works in the obligatory fight and chase sequences, but even those seem just thrown in. It feels like this movie was phoned in making the name kind of ironic. Or perhaps J.Lo kept bothering Ben on the set reminding him to pick up milk and bread ont he way home or something. The movie is entertaining nonetheless, it just falls short of it’s potential. There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours in a theater right now, but you aren’t gonna be heart broken if you wait and catch this on DVD.

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 3 Stars, Aaron Eckhart, Action, Ben Affleck, John Davis, PG-13, Paul Giamatti, SciFi, Theatrical, Uma Thurman