'Paycheck' pays off in thrills

Thursday, December 25, 2003

By Barbara Vancheri, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In these days of surging productivity (code for working longer and harder), you may feel as if you've lost months of your life on the job. In the sleek sci-fi thriller "Paycheck," that is exactly what happens to Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck).

	"Paycheck" RATING: PG-13 for intense action, violence and brief language. STARRING: Ben Affleck, Aaron Eckhart. DIRECTOR: John Woo.

For a very handsome salary, he devotes weeks -- or years -- to an assignment, and then his memory of that period is erased. Using a halo sort of device or chemicals injected with what looks like a ray gun, someone essentially hits a delete button on a slice of his life. That way, he can rightly claim he doesn't recall doing anything illegal or unethical.

Michael is a "reverse engineer" who takes a product, disassembles it, figures out how it ticks and then builds a new and improved model that instantly overtakes the original. "Sometimes it's easier if you work backwards," he says, in a bit of advice that will come in very handy down the road.

He doesn't mind losing a couple of months of his life, not when he can still catch up with recorded Red Sox games, but a billionaire pal named Jimmy (Aaron Eckhart) offers a diabolical deal. Would he accept a job requiring two or three years of his life, in exchange for an eight-figure salary? "One big paycheck, you're done," Jimmy teases.

Michael bites but then finds there's no big paycheck, just an envelope of seemingly ordinary, unrelated items, and that he may be done. Period. He has to work in reverse to figure out what happened to him, where a fetching biologist (Uma Thurman) fits into the picture and how he can save the world from one of his own creations.

Director John Woo's "Paycheck" is based on a 1953 story by Philip K. Dick, the sci-fi author whose stories or novels inspired such movies as "Minority Report," "Total Recall" and "Blade Runner." Screenwriter Dean Georgaris fleshes out the future and asks such puzzlers as: How much money would you take for a small withdrawal from your memory bank? Is it true that if you show someone the future, they have no future?

Affleck, rebounding nicely from the disastrous "Gigli," is not the most expressive of actors, which works to his advantage. You want someone with a sort of blank look to play a man whose memory has been turned into a selective sieve. One of the villains points out the obvious -- "Michael Jennings is not a super agent, he's an engineer" -- but he acts like a super agent in the way he cheats bullets, a speeding locomotive, goons and government agents.

"Paycheck" paints the near-future of 2007 as a clutter-free zone, with Jimmy's office a particularly soulless place decorated with the coldest, hardest of materials. The warm, bulky sweaters Eckhart wore in "Possession" have been replaced by expensive suits and an evil glint in his eyes. Thurman manages to be flirtatious and fearless, while Paul Giamatti, as Michael's friend with the perpetual hangdog look, is so good that he leaves you wanting more.

Woo ("Broken Arrow," "Face/Off" and "Mission: Impossible 2") keeps the guns flashing and the action churning. If he slowed the pace down, the audience might puncture the movie's fragile logic. But an action picture that poses some fascinating futuristic questions and gives Albert Einstein his props is a small guilty pleasure.