Was Paycheck just a Paycheck? (2003)

For quite some time a couple of my friends have been telling me that I should see Paycheck. Everytime it came up, they'd say "How have you not seen Paycheck?!" as if it was the greatest movie ever when it came out. So today while visiting one of these friends, I told him to pick a movie, and this is the one he put on. Paycheck stars Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman and Aaron Eckhart. Not the greatest cast in my opinion. Personally I can't stand Uma Thurman, so that was bad news right off the top. I wasn't sure exactly why my friends were so avid about this movie, but the fact that it was directed by John Woo was at least something to hold onto for hope. Hit the jump to see how it all ended up.


The basic premise here is that this guy Jennings, played by Affleck, can reverse engineer almost anything, and then they erase his memory so there's no liability. Then he's offered a 3 year contract for an 8 figure paycheck based on the value of the company's stocks. After he comes around, he has no idea what has happened for the past 3 years or even what he was working on, but it seems he himself forfeited all the stocks 4 weeks prior, thus losing him over 90 million dollars. Added to that is the government is now out to get him and others are trying to kill him. Now he just has to figure out why.

On paper the story sounds good. In fact even in practice it's not that bad. He has a bunch of random and curious objects that seem to come in perfectly handy no matter what the situation is. I don't think this is much of a spoiler since it's pretty easy to guess and is eventually revealed fairly early in the movie, but there's some predicting of the future going on here. There's a few plot holes and things that don't make sense, well, more than a few actually, but the basic premise is a little interesting at least. The baggy of strange items kinda reminded me of that mini-series 'The Lost Room' in which plain everyday items have fantastic uses. Except in Paycheck the everyday items only have slightly interesting "oh that was handy" uses.

See that dull blank bewildered expression? I bet they're watching Paycheck

But the story isn't really the problem here, unfortunately just about everything else is. The acting was cheesy, the action was predicable, the dialog was lame and the cinematography and editing just wasn't very good. The visuals also made it feel like I was watching a movie from the mid 90s. I'm not sure what this was filmed on, but it just looked bad to me. At least I was treated to a slow motion dove which the movie just wouldn't be complete without.

Now like I said, I watched this movie with one of the 2 guys that were always so amazed that I had never seen the fantastic Paycheck. I think he ended up criticizing the movie even more than I was. In fact at one point we were just openly pointing out plot holes and mocking the film, not even bothering to pay attention to the "deep" character development going on on-screen. Seems it didn't hold up to his memories of it. His own words afterward were "It was kinda crappy, but it wasn't terrible." Take that as you will. I think I share his sentiment.