Rating: 
Summary: Unremarkable, but entertaining.
Review: I went into Paycheck expecting an awful film. I don't particularly like Ben Affleck in action roles such as the one he played in Mark Steven Johnson's DareDevil; I think the actor the did a much better job in Phil Alden Robinson's The Sum Of All Fears, and is more suited of a similar style. Either way, I went into Paycheck expecting complete and utter garbage. Much to my surprise, Paycheck isn't a bad movie.
The film stares Ben Affleck making a living out of learning corporate secrets by reverse engineering their products and selling said secrets to competitors. After each job, his job specific memories are erased to ensure secrecy and avoid legal fiascos. After the movie establishes this, Affleck's character is offered the most lucrative of all job offers, possibly setting him up to retire for the rest of his life. Of course, something inevitably goes wrong and somehow Affleck winds up without anything and no recollection of why the FBI is kicking down his door. The acting in the film is solid throughout. No one really seems to be anything more than collecting a, well, paycheck, but never does the quality of the acting degrade from the film. Indeed, Paycheck's greatest flaw comes from its lack of direction. Director John Woo is capable of immensely stylish work, and the script is based on a story by Hollywood's favorite science-fiction author, Philip K. Dick. On paper, you have two strong sources for something interesting. Unfortunately, the film never seems to decide which way it's going to go in terms of style or content. It certainly isn't dark like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or cautionary like Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (both come from Dick stories), yet at the same time lacks the stylized intensity and violence of Woo's previous work. It lacks the surreal vision of the future that both of the aforementioned films possess, but lacks the visual polish of a true Woo flick. The end result is the film feels watered down; it never really takes off as an action-thriller, but never really breaks ground as a science-fiction morality tale, either.
All that said, Paycheck isn't a bad movie; it just isn't a particularly good one. It is an entertaining flick, enjoyed best with a big bowl of popcorn and laid back mental attitude. It's a good rental, but will hardly be remembered.
Rating: 
Summary: Alright
Review: This movie reminds me of Independence Day with Will Smith. In this movie Ben Affleck tries to be like some action camera that can fight and win the girl; well, that did not fit him at all. Movies about the future are so played, every director seems to have tried it one way or the other.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting idea but......
Review: This is the sort of movie you could watch on a bus or a plane, or in a hotel room if you were desperate for something to watch. A good time filler and mildly entertaining, but not much else. The story idea is interesting enough but the movie itself doesn't really have staying power. 5 minutes after you've watched it you struggle to remember what the movie was all about. I must confess my main interest in seeing it was for the motorcycle chase, that didn't disappoint me, although the sound effects for the bike sounded a bit fake.
But don't get me wrong, I wasn't disappointed in the movie. But that's because I didn't really expect too much out of it to begin with. And neither should anybody else who wants to see this movie.
Rating: 
Summary: worst movie ever made
Review: I didn't actually watch this movie, but I have to say I really hated it. I borrowed the movie from a freind and watched it for about 30 seconds, and pretty much got the jist of it. Then I skipped through the chapters, and watched a few seconds here and there, and that just affirmed my initial impression - that the movie just plain stinks. This movie proves that there are great actors, like Uma Thurman, and that guy that was in Brother From Another Planet, in this world who have no standards. They'll take whatever work is offered to them. I think just looking at the script for this thing would have been enough for any sane person to tell that it was going to stink. There's one chase scene and one fight scene which were both pretty lame. And the entire plot of the movie will just make you go beddy-bye. It's that same old gimmick about someone getting his memory erased - like in Eraser, Eternal Sunshine...., Men in Black. And it's got that same old gimmick with the computers of the future where instead of a monitor, the data is displayed in 3-D in the space before you and Ben Affleck can touch it with his hands and flip it around and rotate it. Although there appears to be no practical need to do such a thing, someone on the crew thinks it looks cool. And of course, this being a John Woo flick, there's the must-have scene with the good-guy and bad-guy both standing toe-to-toe holding big guns in each others faces and calmly talking to each other for 2 minutes explaining why they do what they do. I actually like the John Woo movies I've seen - Broken Arrow and Face Off. But there you had John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. Here we have Ben Affleck, who is known for what?...quick....what movie comes to mind?...Reindeer Games? ..that doesn't count....too late. He's just Ben Affleck, doing his Ben Affleck thing, which is...being Ben Affleck... he's not cool...not funny.....not intense or anything, ...just Ben Affleck, getting his life back together after his whirlwind romance with J-Lo. Just being Ben, whatever that means...you know...just exuding that Affleck persona.....that persona of...just can't put my finger on it. Whatever it is, it's boring. Again, I have not really seen this movie. I could be wrong. Maybe if I actually followed it through scene by scene, uninterrupted, I might appreciate the subtleties of Affleck's performance and the complexity of the plot and brilliant choreography of the stunts and everything. Because, like I said, I olny saw a total of about 1 minute of the movie. But I have to say, based on that one minute of viewing, it looks like the worst movie ever made.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Philip K. Dick
Review: This is pure John Woo... If you are looking for something more along the lines of what PKD writes, this doesn't make the grade (except in one area, mentioned below), despite its origin. While I'm not familiar with the short story, I am familiar with PKD's writings and this does not fit his style. What this is, is a well-executed action-adventure film that has an element of SF in a present-day earth setting. Forget the chemistry between Thurman and Affleck (Thurman doesn't have chemistry in most of her films, anyway), the film is a nice little puzzle that carries you along with Affleck's character. After last year's raft of blockbusters, it isn't surprising to see films like this one disappoint so many people. This is no comic book adaptation of a superhero, though the previews might lead to suspect it is. It is nothing more than a mystery with an element of time travel mixed in (actually, there isn't any time travel involved... I said element and that's different). Is the story plausible? Well, the science isn't exactly current at any level, mostly because we don't have anything to remotely resemble it. So don't look for familiar theories validated through the story line. PKD never did that much, anyway... he was a futurist (i.e., Bladerunner) who liked to give us puzzles and some humor. Humor, this lacks, but that's okay because it is generally a serious film. But is the story plausible? Yes, as long as you don't try to tie in our current science (theoretical and practical). Let yourself go when you watch this and enjoy it for what it is... There just isn't anything more than action-adventure with a nice little puzzle for our protagonist to solve...
Rating:
Summary: wish my future hadn't included watching this
Review: A boring, wasted, cliche of a film. You can just about forgive the idea that a braniac engineer can be a super hero. But the other stupidities are just too annoying. The main one being the whole central tenent that our hero must destroy 'the machine'. Er, then what about the plans used to build the machine (and the backups)? Would blowing up a BMW (one of the many products placed) destroy the abiltiy build anymore? Ah, Woo's just rubbish, yes there's a motorcycle chase, yes men fight guns with broom sticks and yes there's too many slo-mos. Guess the future's pretty easy to see after all.
Rating:
Summary: I'm Glad I Waited To Rent This
Review: I wasn't too excited when this movie hit theaters but thought the premise was good enough to catch on a rental. As a sci-fi buff and a Blade Runner fan, it is hard to let this one go by. The story is different, which is what I like. However, the thing that makes the movie neat gets old after seeing it work 5 times... and you need to watch all 20 fall into place to solve the big mystery. There was one thing that really erked me, only because it happened in Minority Report as well. I work with computers, and therefore, security. I've got it down so that anybody who leaves the company usually can't get back through the security system before they even leave the door the last time. This isn't bragging, any company is like this. However, it seems that this ex-employee (as well as the one in Minority Report) can be hunted by the company and law-enforcement and yet nobody blocks their security to prevent them from coming back in. COME ON!!!!!!! And the unbelievability doesn't stop there, but that is the one that had me screaming... AGAIN!! Worth watching? For die-hard sci-fi lovers, oh yes (once)!!! For somebody who likes explosions and intense action? Er, that one is up in the air, that department could have been better (and more believable). Anybody else, I would say no. Save your money or rent something else. You've been warned. Worth buying? I can't imagine why anybody would want this in their collection!!
Rating:
Summary: Unconvincing Affleck in an unconvcing plot
Review: Michael Mitchell (Affleck) is an engineer. But not a regular engineer; a reverse engineer. This means he takes stuff apart and tries to figure out exactly how it works, and better yet, how to enhance it. His services are often used by a company owned by a friend of his. While he receives big checks, the company demands that, in order to keep their intellectual property safe, Michael's memory of the period during which he worked for them will be erased. Michael gets hired for his biggest job ever: A three year contract, worth 90 million dollars. A close friend tries to persuade him not to do it, but in vain. After the three years are up and Michael tries to cash in his paycheck, it turns out that he cancelled the check a few weeks in advance. As if that's not bad enough, his personal belongings that he had to stash away before he started the three-year period, have been switched with other stuff. This, again, was done by himself. Because his memory was erased though, Michael has absolutely no idea what's going on. To top it off, it turns out he's wanted by the Feds who want to question him about his work. This kicks off a series of events in which Michael will have to discover what he did for the company, why he would possibly sign a document waving the 90 million dollars away, and what went on during the missing three years. The story itself seems hardly original, and the same can be said about the movie. While Uma Thurman's performance is convincing, I had a hard time imagining the two of them being friends, let alone lovers. I especially had difficulty imagining Affleck as a hacker, or anyone in possession of half-a-brain for that matter. Woo, the director, prints his mark on the flick by using lots of explosions and gunshots, including two face-offs during which two people have their gun locked on one another. Yes, think Face Off. Entertaining? Yes. But hardly original or intellectually challenging.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing, illogical sci-fi turkey
Review: This has to be one of the worst sci-fi movies I have seen lately. How bad is it? The day after I saw it, I asked myself if I had seen all of it. Indeed, I had. I simply could not remember how it ended because I'd lost all interest midway through. In considering the movie, the word 'insipid' comes to mind. The premise is ridiculous. A man named Michael [Ben Affleck] is well paid by a nefarious corporation run by James Rethrick [Aaron Eckhart] to carry out jobs which require his memory to be erased at the end of each one. When he is offered a job which will wipe out two or three years of his life, he hesitates but is soon lured by an astronomical paycheck. When he 'comes to' at the end of his mission, he finds that he has forfeited his pay. Then he receives a mysterious package containing several seemingly unrelated items. He goes on a hunt to discover the truth, no easy task considering that he can't remember anything. The plots of most sci-fi movies are ridiculous. The good ones, though, cause us to suspend disbelief, at least until after the movie is over. The great ones make us want really to believe the premise and to cast logic to the wind. ["Alien" comes to mind.] "Paycheck" simply makes us roll our eyes and shake our heads. The other problem is Ben Affleck as the main character. I don't know if he really can't act, or if he has lately been so preoccupied that he doesn't feel like acting. Here, he tries vainly to act against the fine Mr. Eckhart and the incredible Uma Thurman. One might say that, for example, Harrison Ford can't act, but he is very, very good at being Harrison Ford, the Star. Mr. Affleck can't even do that. So, what are his latest paychecks for?
Rating:
Summary: Terrible in every way
Review: Man this is bad. Stupid story full of gaping plot holes, wretched flat performances from both lead actors, and tedious stunts. It's time to admit that Woo is simply a bad director, unable to capture any of the qualities that made him good ten years ago. He's still into the sappy symbolism (a flying white dove! Means freedom!), stupidly big explosions, and puts not one but TWO references to the famous point-blank-guns-pointed-at-each-other pose from the Killers. The one redeeming thing is that Woo *didn't* use the alternate ending that's one of the special features on this DVD: a gut-churningly bad scene that has Ben recovering a diamond ring and proposing to Uma as she flutters her hands with joy.
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