n near-future Seattle, Michael Jennings (Affleck) is a coveted commodity: a reverse engineer who can take a competitor's technology, dismantle it and figure out how to make it better. "Sometimes it's easier if you work backwards," he tells clients. In exchange, he's paid well and lives the life of a wealthy bachelor. But there's a price: After each top-secret project, he submits to a memory wipe that eliminates months of his life.
Jennings tells his nebbishy sidekick Shorty (Paul Giamatti) that it's worth it. His life is a series of memory highlights: a tropical vacation, the big game. "What you erase, it doesn't matter," he says.
Invited to a lavish party by former colleague Rethrick (Eckhart), Jennings finds himself attracted to a beautiful biologist, Rachel Porter (Thurman). She works for Rethrick at the high-tech Allcon Corporation. But no sooner does Jennings meet Rachel than he is whisked away by Rethrick, who has a proposition for him.
It's Jennings' biggest payday ever. He'll get $100 million if he agrees to reverse-engineer a top-secret machine. The catch: He'll have to submit to a memory erasure that will eliminate as much as three years of his life.
Jennings agrees. At Allcon's headquarters, Jennings says goodbye to Rachel in her greenhouse biolab before going into the lab where he will spend the next three years. As the immense door slides shut, he glances back and sees Rachel as she playfully flicks water at him.
It's the last thing he remembers when he suddenly finds himself back in Rethrick's office. Three years have passed. "You're done!" Rethrick tells him with pleasure.
But when Jennings goes to collect his paycheck, he finds only a manila envelope filled with random objects. Who forfeited his big payday? He did, months ago, with an order for which he has no memory. Panicked, Jennings tries to call Rethrick when he's set upon by FBI agents and captured.
Alfred Hitchcock meets Philip K. Dick
Paycheck is the latest big-studio movie spun off the fevered imaginings of legendary SF author Dick. But as reimagined by Georgaris and Hong Kong action specialist Woo, the movie bears only a passing resemblance to Dick's 1953 exercise in paranoia, taking only character names and the story's intriguing premise. Instead, Woo has given audiences one of his trademark action thrillers, with explicit nods to earlier suspensers by master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock by way of North by Northwest and The 39 Steps. It would be nice to think such an amalgam would work better than it does, but this Paycheck, for all its stylishness and cool ideas, doesn't really pay off.
Paycheck feels like second-tier Woo, more Hard Target than Face/Off. There's plenty to please the die-hard fan, including imaginatively staged action, signature camera moves and even a dove or two. Affleck fills out his 1950s-inspired suits nicely and credibly inhabits the innocent-in-extraordinary-circumstances familiar to Hitchcock fans.
But Thurman's innate snarkiness—perfect for Quentin Tarantino movies—doesn't serve her Paycheck character, a tree-hugging Earth mother-cum-science geek. Woo wanted to see Affleck and Thurman as a latter-day Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, but that's aiming way too high, and the film's central romance feels forced. (Compare an earlier encounter between Affleck's Jennings and an icy lawyer played by Cold Case's Kathryn Morris, which sizzles right off the screen.)
Beyond that, the movie's scenario is overly complicated, yet predictable once the viewer grasps a few key ideas. Georgaris doesn't help, hammering home plot points in case the viewer's attention wanders momentarily. About midway through the story, the movie threatens to degenerate into yet another generic action movie, all car chases and shootouts.
