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Back Shelf Beauties
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Paycheck You're only as good as your last movie's box office totals, so Ben Affleck is in trouble. It has been a rough year for the golden boy. Gigli has become synonymous with "biggest bomb of all time", advance buzz on his next movie, Jersey Girl, is very bad, his Project Greenlight experiment yielded two failures before getting cancelled by HBO, and Disney unofficially dumped the next film he was going to do, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (which has a cool premise, so I hope someone makes it). On top of all of that, his potential marriage to J Lo didn't happen, no one knows if it ever will, and most of us are sick and tired of hearing about it. This is a guy desperately in need of a hit. Paycheck and director John Woo might be his savior. Affleck stars as Michael - a reverse engineer who takes other people's inventions, figures them out, and improves them. He makes a decent living working for the Allcom company, run by his buddy Jimmy (Aaron Eckhart), however, Michael doesn't know what he has done because he gets his memory erased after every assignment. He only loses a month or two of boring work-oriented memories, lives well on the money, and can't ever testify against Jimmy for what might be illegal behavior. One day, Jimmy makes Michael the best offer of all time. He can work on a very special and lucrative project for 3 years, get his memory erased, and make enough money to never work again. Once he's out, and his memory has been erased, Michael is left wondering what he has done, and why he didn't take the huge payoff. What was this top-secret project? Why is Michael in so much danger? Paycheck is an unabashed action film that doesn't need much of a plot or script, but overachieves with decent ones on both counts. Even the love story between Michael and Rachel (Uma Thurman) is a good addition without mucking up the works. Writer Dean Georgaris (based on a short story by Phillip K. Dick) throws in plenty of little twists and turns, but the script does have some faults. We need more establishment of that love story to make the bond between the two more believable, I disagree with a huge plot point towards the end of the movie, and I would have ended it differently, but I'll let you see it and judge for yourself. On the positive side, Georgaris tries to let us solve the mystery along with Michael, which is a nice way to keep our brains involved in the movie, and he creates some believable characters who don't do anything unnatural, although I would have liked more explanation behind Jimmy's motives. Like the script, the direction and acting is OK enough. When you hire John Woo to make a movie, you know what you're going to get. Woo has a very distinct style with several recurring scenes and techniques (the Mexican standoff, the motorcycle chases, the super slo mo to highlight explosive action or a star moving through mist/fog/smoke and the flying doves). You get all of that in this movie, but it's so cool, you just don't care if you've seen it a hundred times. Woo makes the film as good as it is by ratcheting up the action, filming taught chase scenes, and giving Michael a good nemesis in Wolfe (Colm Feore). He knows how to move the action along without overdoing it, and gets the best out of his stars. Ultimately, Paycheck works because Affleck does a decent job. While many of his facial expressions seem cartoonish and overdone, he is a good leading man with plenty of charm. He plays a good everyman/regular guy you can relate to and one you want to see succeed. Affleck finds the right combination of earnestness, cockiness and toughness to make Michael heroic and vulnerable, which makes you wonder if he'll make it. For all of its flaws and slight lack of plot development, Paycheck is worth spending some of yours this weekend. 3 Waffles (Out of 4) Copyright 2003 - WaffleMovies.com
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