Paycheck

Throughout Paycheck, I was aware of a deep grinding noise in the background. By the end of the film, I'd worked out it had two sources. First, the noise of Philip K Dick spinning in his grave and second, the sound of traffic passing through the tunnels they'd built in the holes in the plot.

You may have heard of the concept of the 'idiot plot' - a plot that's so stupid, with so many holes in it that it can only be made to make sense if everyone in the film is an idiot. This is not just an idiot plot - this is the Platonic ideal form of the idiot plot, in which every character, no matter how minor, no matter how intelligent their character is meant to be, behaves as though they're a total moron. You can make an idiot plot work, but it requires your characters to be idiots, and for the audience to understand that they are idiots (see for example, Dude, Where's My Car? which actually follows a similar plotline of missing memory, clues and advanced technology). However, you can't make an idiot plot in which your characters (even Bumface Ben Affleck himself) are supposed to be scientific geniuses of various description.

Are there two John Woos in the world? It would explain a lot. The first is the talented director of Face/Off, amongst other movies while the second is a talentless hack churning out drivel like Paycheck. And does screenwriter Dean Georgaris really exist, or is he merely a pseudonym for the five monkeys with typewriters or the Script-O-Tron 3000 screenwriting system? Nothing happens that hasn't been heavily foreshadowed (right down to pointing out that Affleck is a master of the futuristic martial art known as 'hitting things with sticks') and the sole purpose of the FBI agents (aside from Agent 'I shall temporarily forget that this is a no smoking building' setting off the world's most ridiculous fire prevention system) seems to be to act as a Greek chorus, telling us what's going on when there's no way to lever it into the rest of the script.

And can someone tell me just what Allcom is meant to do (besides being an Evil Corporation, of course)? Its organisation appears to have been determined at random, unless someone can give me a convincing reason why it appears to have a combined Time Travel and Botany division. Unfortunately for such a powerful and evil corporation it seems to have sent its assassins and hit squads to the same School Of Not Shooting Straight And Being Easily Distracted By Bright Shiny Things as the Empire, while the bosses have obviously gone to lots of special seminars with titles like 'Overcomplication: your key to success' and 'The end of the world: why it could be a business opportunity'.

On a sidenote, one plot point - that the discovery of any time travel technology by a nation would cause global nuclear war - was borrowed wholesale from an episode of the Logan's Run TV series. And before you complain that I'm giving away the story, tha only matters if you're intending to go an watch this film. If you are, then your main concern will be to stop your brain from exploding with anger at the stupidity of it, not that I've given away any plot points.

Anyway, before I cast this movie off into the outer darkness, and wish for a technology that would erase it from my mind, two last points. First, the ancient martial art hitting people with sticks. There's a scene early on which establishes that Affleck's character (he does have a name, but I've chosen to forget it) is rather good at hitting things with a long stick (no, it's not Kendo, just hitting things with sticks) which seems to be there for no reason, until you realise that Script-O-Matic 3000 doesn't allow that sort of wasted scene, and so later in the film, Ben gets his chance to hit some bad guys with a stick. It's just that he puts down a gun to do it. Yes, in the future, a stick will be a more effective weapon than a gun.

But the film's much more grievous sin is wasting Paul Giamatti, introducing him at the start, then losing him after about half an hour before bringing him back at the end for a 'everybody smile and laugh' ending straight out of Police Squad! Where his character (who in a vaguely bad film, rather than an abominally bad one, would at least have got to feature in an unsurprising twist at the end) goes for this time isn't explained, unless he stays locked up in the handy plot cupboard he wanders into.

In short, this is a bad bad movie. Do not watch it. Walk away. Leave it on the shelf at the video store and pick up something else. Change the channel. Petition TV companies not to show it. Avoid.