Paycheck (Spanish)

Buy This Item Paycheck (Spanish) by Paramount  Available from Amazon  $9.99  on 11-29-2008     The brainy, paranoid science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick has inspired one visionary classic (<I>Blade Runner</I>) and two above-average action movies (<I>Total Recall</I> and <I>Minority Report</I>). <I>Paycheck</I> aspires to follow in their footsteps: An engineer (Ben Affleck, <I>Chasing Amy</I>) routinely agrees to have his memory erased after every job so that he doesn't know what he's done. But after the biggest job of his life, he discovers that not only has he refused a $90 million paycheck, he's sent himself an envelope full of things he doesn't recognize--and he doesn't remember doing any of this. As he unravels the plot, he discovers he's also fallen in love (with Uma Thurman, <I>Kill Bill</I>) and invented a dangerous device for his former boss (Aaron Eckhart, <I>Erin Brockovich</I>). Affleck is bland, the script ruins a cunning idea, and the direction--from the normally dynamic John Woo (<I>Face/Off</I>)--plods along, aimless and bored. <I>--Bret Fetzer</I> Reader Reviews Sci-fi actioner directed by John Woo in which square-jawed Ben Affleck pays Michael Jennings, a gifted computer engineer who takes on secretive computer projects for corporations for large sums of cash with one catch: the corporations insist that after completing each assignment he must have his short-term memory wiped so that he remembers nothing of the work that he has done. Each assignment thus far has been short-term, lasting no more than eight weeks, so each time Jennings has had his memory wiped after completing an assignment he has lost no more than eight weeks of his life. But this time he has been offered an assignment by a company called Allcom for which he will be paid $92 million on its completion, enough to set him up for life. The problem? It is a long-term assignment, lasting three years, which means that he will have to lose three years worth of memories upon completion of the assignment. Jennings weighs up this cost but the money is just too much of an incentive and he agrees to do the assignment. However after completing the mystery assignment and having his last three years of memory wiped Jennings finds out that four weeks before his memory was wiped he sold his stock options in Allcom - meaning that he will not get any of the $92 million he was promised - and on top of that he is a wanted man: his former bosses at Allcom want him dead. But Jennings does not know why, as he has no memory of the past three years. With his life in the balance and with an envelope of clues and useful items that he left for himself four weeks before his memory was wiped Jennings manages to locate some allies: his friend Shorty (played by Paul Giamatti) and love interest and employee of Allcom Dr Rachel (played by Uma Thurman), and with their help sets out to uncover just what he was doing over the last three years - including why he gave up the $92 million - all the while trying to avoid assassination by hit men working for his former bosses at Allcom. What he discovers is that during his three missing years he built a machine that could very well mean the end of the world, a machine that must be destroyed at any cost. I found this to be a good sci-fi film from John Woo, with a strong plot and predictably good action and fight sequences. John Woo certainly knows how to put together a good movie, and the clues that Jennings has to decipher throughout the movie are very enjoyable, although I felt there could have been more of the theoretical physics behind the machine that Jennings builds addressed in the film. My only other complaint is that the climax to the movie does not quite have enough impact (although it almost does). Nonetheless this is a very good movie, so I give it 4 stars.

Paycheck (Spanish) Available from Amazon Price: $9.99 Updated on 11-29-2008.

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