Mini Review - Paycheck

Like a lot of mini reviews of late I’m going into this one without having watched it before. But there are things to point out. We have Ben Affleck, famous for playing killer versions of non-killer superheroes (Batman and Daredevil), Uma Therman, Poison Ivy from Batman and Robin and directed by Jon Woo, director of the worst of the Mission Impossible movies. Let’s take a look at Paycheck.

Released in 2003 to poor reviews (27% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average 4.7/10) Paycheck made $93m on a $60m budget, taking off theatre’s cuts the film likely didn’t make its money back. Here’s my thoughts as to why.

Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) is a reverse-engineer. He’s paid really good money to spend a few days reverse-engineering competitor’s technology and improving upon it in some ways. To ensure confidentiality he undergoes a memory wipe after each job. One day he’s approached by an old associate offering him a 3-year multi-million-dollar job, he agrees to it.

When the job is finished he finds his personal possessions have been changed to a grab bag of seemingly insignificant items, he’s sacrificed his money, he’s wanted by the FBI on charge of treason and the company he worked for is trying to kill him. With no memory of what he did the last 3 years, it’s up to him and a small group of allies to uncover the truth before things spiral out of control.

This movie would’ve been a great entry to Time Month, since pre-cognition vs free will is the subject of the conflict of the episode. It’s not handled in any deep fashion since the protagonist chooses free will without so much as a thought but it’s worth bringing up. And yes, this does mean it compares with Minority Report, which also focused on this subject. Minority Report handled the subject with a more interesting plot and less clear-cut answers, helped by the fact that in Minority Report it was a law-enforcement agency whereas here it’s a corrupt business that has this technology. Also, Minority Report has Tom Cruise and the direction of Spielberg whereas this has Ben Affleck and the direction of Jon Woo, and yes, there is a scene with a dove that serves absolutely no purpose.

There is a problem with characters in this movie too, most of them are reasonably basic. The villain is corporate and not really interesting, the FBI are only pretending to be interested in the death of a guy and more interested in the machine. Jennings spends most of the time with memory issues so it’s hard to get an insight into his character and his girlfriend Rachel Porter (Uma Therman) (also, she’s a botanist) is little more than a generic love interest.

But this is small potatoes to my bigger issues with this movie. Jennings is a reverse engineer, but he can shoot, can fight off some guys, can handle a bo-staff, and is somehow able to do expert bike stunts? HOW? I know he’s seen the future and that helps (except he's wiped his memory so it kinda doesn't) but that doesn’t suddenly make him an expert fighter or marksman! Speaking of, there’s a scene in the movie where he abandons his girlfriend for basically no reason at all. He says has to face the consequences of what he did but he already destroyed the machine, Mission accomplished, LEAVE! Also, slightly earlier before sabotaging the machine, he decides to fix it for some reason. Why?!

The honest truth though, this movie is not as bad as I thought it would be. The plot is shallow along with the characters, the acting is sub-par for the most part, the story has a few gaping issues and sometimes the director goes too far to enact his own style but ultimately, these are not movie-breaking issues for me. When the style works it works well, the ideas here are interesting and worth exploring in another movie and it’s actually reasonably well paced for a movie that stretches to nearly 2 hours. I’m glad I saw this, although I probably won’t see it again.

Rating 55/100