Was 'Paycheck' any good? Uh, we don't remember

By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter

	DOUG CURRAN / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Uma Thurman, left, is the action-scientist girlfriend and Ben Affleck is the "world-famous genius" on the run and with amnesia in the forgettable "Paycheck."
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Remember the old joke about an agent so secret that even he didn't know what he was doing?

Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) isn't an agent but a "world-famous genius" who does high-tech projects for big companies then lets them erase his memories to purge the top-secret information. And as a genius running for his life, Affleck's got the intensity of a frat brother racing to return a keg before he loses the deposit.

How'd he get in the jam? Jennings agrees to lose three years of his life on an eight-figure job for slick-haired CEO Aaron Eckhart. When he comes out of it, tabula rasa, he's broke, framed and pursued by guys with lousy aim.

All he's got are questions about what happened in the missing years, and an envelope filled with random household items which come in handy at just the right moments.

Movie review Showtimes and trailer *½ "Paycheck," with Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman and Aaron Eckhart. Directed by John Woo, from a screenplay by Dean Georgaris, based on the Philip K. Dick story. 110 minutes. Rated PG-13 for intense action violence and brief language. Several theaters.

Seem familiar? Sounds like Affleck and his pal Matt "Bourne Identity" Damon went script-shopping together. But it comes from the late Philip K. Dick, whose fantastic tales of identity and memory have met with varying degrees of success in "Total Recall," "Minority Report," "Blade Runner" and others. With a title preordained to come back to bite the filmmakers in the caboose, "Paycheck" falls toward the unfortunate "Impostor" end of the spectrum.

After the reeking "Windtalkers," fans of once-great Hong Kong action director John Woo still have awhile to wait before he makes his definitive American movie. In fact, it's hard to recommend even to his die-hards because it barely seems like a Woo flick. You get your dove, you get your guys in standoffs with pistols to each other's heads. But you get little of Woo's signature style or beautifully choreographed and photographed violence. Unless you count shading stuff blue.

There is plenty of action, but it's so rote that if you hooked yourself up to an EKG, the needle would never jump.

A stunt-filled motorcycle chase looks like something you'd see in a spoof about a movie in which there was a stunt-filled motorcycle chase.

On the back of the bike with Affleck: Uma Thurman, as his action-scientist girlfriend from the lost three years. Fresh from "Kill Bill," she can handle the physicality but is barely more convincing at the rest of it than Affleck — who, by the way, sports a distracting plot of unnatural-looking astro-turf hair. Paul Giamatti, who showed what he could do in "American Splendor," is embarrassingly and briefly used as Jennings' comic-relief sidekick.

And you could never tell that Eckhart once made skin crawl as a bad guy for director Neil LaBute.

The one potentially intriguing element of this walk-through is the envelope that Jennings has left himself, as he uses the odds and ends it contains to unlock his past and get him out of fixes. But it's played with the obviousness and over-convenience of a video game.

You could see "Paycheck" and forget about it, but that's not exactly the shortest distance between two points.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com

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