Paycheck

Reviewed by Rich Drees

     Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) is a reverse engineer who gets top dollar from corporations to break down their competitor’s products to discover their secrets. Since his job boarders on patent infringement, he voluntarily undergoes an erasure of his memory following each job to protect all involved. He is approached by his old college friend Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart), now the owner of a large technology company with the foreboding name Allcom, with a special assignment. Even though it will take three years to complete, Jennings is convinced by the large paycheck.

     Waking up from his memory wipe three years later, Jennings finds things have not gone to plan. In place of the eight figure pay day he was expecting, he finds that at the end of his three years, he elected to forfeit his paycheck and sent himself an envelope with twenty fairly innocuous items like a paperclip, a lighter and a Chinese fortune cookie fortune. Along with his friend Shorty (An underused Paul Giamatti) figures out that the project he was working on was a way of foreseeing the future. Having seen something in the future, Jennings sabotaged the machine before the memory wipe and is now being chased by Rethrick’s men and federal agents (led by Joe Morton) who want to know what it is he can’t remember. Helping him along the way are his beautiful scientist/girlfriend (Uma Thurman) whom he has no recollection of and the items that he mailed to himself to help himself out of the various scrapes he gets into.

     The film strives to be a Hitchcockian thriller with its “wronged man on the run” plot but unfortunately the script contains too many logic holes to overlook. If Jennings was confined to the grounds of the research facility for three years, how did he manage to get some of the items that he mailed to himself? The memory erasures that Jennings gets makes for a neat device to give our hero amnesia, but raises the question how he remains at the top of his field when his memory wipes should also remove any experience and knowledge that would help keep him at the top of his game. The gimmick of having Jennings sending himself several items that will help while on the run from his pursuers at first seems creative but ultimately hampers the movie. Knowing that merely reaching into his bag of tricks can solve any scrape that Jennings gets into robs the film of much of its suspense. The only real tension comes at the end of the film when Jennings runs out of items. Unfortunately, these scenes are undercut by Eckhart’s acting suddenly descending into the cartoonish.

     For whatever suspense they lack, Woo at least manages to make the action sequences visually engaging. The film’s action highlight is a sequence involving Jennings and Rachel on a motorcycle being chased through an outdoor shipping container storage facility by armed bad guys in cars and Federal agents in a helicopter. There are still a few sloppy moments though, most notably when Jennings is trying to figure out what is happening to him and we suddenly flashback to a scenes that we only saw just five minutes previously. A few of the director’s trademark visual moments are also in the film for fans to find.