PAYCHECK (2003)
Why do memory-wipe movies always make me wish I had my memory wiped?
Philip K. Dick's stories are way cool, you should know that. But the movies based on them have been pretty spotty. One was great (Blade Runner), one was good (Minority Report), a couple were acceptable (Total Recall and Screamers), one pretty weak (Soldier), one was really awful (Impostor, though as a short film it was much better). The American films of John Woo have had a similar track record. So I figured that any movie that was both would either be magic, or a disaster. Paycheck ain't magic.

Paycheck is set in a future so near that its only noticeable difference from the present is Minority Report's excessive concern with the computer displays of the future. Ben Affleck stars as a reverse engineer who works on stuff for a couple of months at a time, and then gets his memory wiped (some confidentiality agreement!) come payday. He's given a three-year, eight-figure deal to work on some...something, and when he comes out of that, he's found that he's rejected his paycheck and instead left himself an envelope with twenty unremarkable items in it. These items keep coming in handy when his company (as represented by Cold Case's Kathryn Morris, sporting another awful haircut) tries to kill him, and the FBI puts him in the Aurora Chair.

These memories - which we sometimes see on computer monitors - are mostly from a third-person perspective, and some of them are even full-on John Woo money shots. He gets hazy recollections of a woman he worked with (Uma Thurman) but the company counts on him not being able to remember her specifically, so they send a decoy in a wig and contacts to him. Uma saves his ass there, but later gets pouty when he can't remember their love. Shit, lady - you do understand that he had his brain erased, right?

Paycheck works during those brief moments when uses are found for those items; about half of them are impossible to predict, and that's what makes them fun. But there are only twenty items, and a bunch of them are used in pairs, and with a running time of almost two hours that's a lot of time left over for the movie not to work, especially when the last one is used with about twenty-five minutes to go.

Such filler: the introductory scene of Affleck at work. We're not dumb, and we've seen this kind of thing before - we don't need his job explained to us this laboriously. I think it was twenty minutes into the movie before they brought up the big project, and that's where the movie should've started. When you make a movie about a guy who gets part of his memory erased, you don't spill all the beans about him fresh out of the gate.

As one might expect from a John Woo movie, the sci-fi elements are almost entirely subjugated to the whiz-bang action scenes, which at least are not as tedious as those in Windtalkers, though nowhere near as fun as those in Face/Off. I can buy that these two eggheads can outfight professional hit squads (one early scene has Affleck practicing staff combat) but they can apparently out-drive them too, as in a chase in a freight yard which seems so specifically designed for chases. And who shot up that car that blew up? It's sprayed with bullets, flips, and crashes - but neither Ben nor Uma are armed. The "explosive" finale at least has one inspired moment, involving a robot arm that quickly and gracefully reverses a situation.

If the story and action doesn't hold up in a movie like this, the dialogue and acting have to be pretty damn good to save it. This movie stars Ben Affleck and has lines like "So, how does it feel knowing you're going to die?" which could probably be asked of anyone over the age of six or so.

For two movies - and to a lesser degree, BlackJack - John Woo seemed like he could do no wrong in his American movies, Broken Arrow notwithstanding. He'd done great work in Hong Kong and seemed on track to continue his winning streak in the States. So what happened? I appreciate that he's branching out a bit into science fiction and war movies, but it seems like he's trying to adapt them to his own style, instead of adapting his style to them. In such movies, he's got to demonstrate that he has more to offer than things that go boom.

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