Review of Paycheck (2003) by Stefano L — 07 Jun 2015

Holding the dubious dual honour of being possibly the worst adaptation of a Philip K. Dick idea and the worst John Woo film at the same time Paycheck is kind of a mess. It didn't have to, though. The story is neatly engaging and the cast has potential, not even the director is that terrible? So what happened? Well, Paycheck came out at the height of early aughties confusion when 'audience movies' and studio decisions neatly overlapped to give us milquetoast action movies. This was before the action revolution, before the marvel cinematic universe, before even batman begins. It was the year that gave us the atrocious spider man 2, daredevil and xmen 2 as well as the two big budget, concept spoiling matrix sequels. Looking back at all this it all seems quite quaint, really and I can't help but wonder what a better director would have done with the IP.

So what's wrong with the movie? So many things in such little baffling ways. Ben affleck is wholly unbelievable as an 'engineer' (compare and contrast to Carruth in primer), the other actors, including eckhart are hamming it up and the time aspects of the plot are poorly explored. Paul Giamatti gets too little screen time, Uma Thurman gets too much and the action scenes are utterly forgettable despite the fact that this is a John Woo Film.

Paycheck is a bad movie, such a bad movie in fact that it seems like the director saw an apocalyptic future triggered by the movie in a reverse engineered machine and designed the movie to be shit and forgettable to save us all. Avoid.