Paycheck

John Woo's Hong Kong films have influenced nearly every big action film you've seen in the last 10 years or so, but his American films don't have anywhere near the same impact. Hard Target was silly but fun, Broken Arrow was over the top but harmless fun, Face/Off possibly being his best so far, MI:2 was woeful but gorgeous to look at, Windtalkers was seen by almost nobody, and now we have Paycheck, which has Woo out of step with himself.

Paycheck was a short story by Philip K. Dick, so we should have something interesting right away. The central concept is quite intriguing: what if we could see the future, but the future we saw wasn't very nice, and the reason it wasn't very nice was because we had created something that could see that future? However, Woo, who is apparently not a great fan of sci-fi (as evidenced by Face/Off, which was originally more futuristic, but Woo cut away most of that to leave the idea in a more realistic setting - he got away with it because the central story played to his strengths of loyalty, honour, two diametrically opposed men being intrinsically linked), decides to ignore the future and play the film as a chase movie in homage to Hitchcock, particularly North By North West. Face/Off succeeded, but this doesn't/

Ben Affleck is the Cary Grant of this film, so he gets to wear a suit for most of it, but he mostly plays Ben Affleck, which he usually gets away with for most of his career. He smirks, and shouts, and smiles his smile, and runs, and does all the things that the chased hero has to do. Uma Thurman is the love interest, but she doesn't seem very comfortable throughout the film (and she really shouldn't be allowed to play a biologist, or any scientist, after her awful turn as Dr. Pamela 'Poison Ivy' Isley in the spectacularly bad Batman & Robin) and makes you think that she is doing films just so she can get back in the public consciousness after being off the scene having babies. The only person to come away unaffected is the ever-reliable Paul Giamatti, who is funny and appropriate where necessary as always.

The film has plot holes to spare (Why would an FBI agent smoke in a government building? How could Affleck's character change the contents of his personal envelope, as well as including a security card that can be tracked by the company? How does he work the machine if his memory has been erased? Why are people still travelling in buses in the future? Why does he use videotape to watch his recorded baseball games, when he is so rich and would be using DVD? (Well, those aren't plot holes, but I had to mention them.) Why didn't they kill him directly if it was so important that he not be able to link actions back to the corporation? How did he leave a message in the mirror that wouldn't be seen to the right day by the use of steam from the shower, that hadn't been cleaned off or seen before?) just using coincidence to forward the story. Even the action scenes themselves are nothing worth mentioning, which is a sad thing to say for John Woo, who unfortunately uses his trademark flying dove at an embarrassing moment in the film. If Woo doesn't want to do action films anymore (he has long confessed a desire to do a musical with Chow Yun-Fat), then why doesn't he admit it and not do films that involve certain aspects that he doesn't want to do, such as science fiction? If they wanted someone to do a Hitchcock impression, they could've got Brian De Palma.

Rating: DA