Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Prismark10 Paycheck is a modest futuristic action thriller by hard boiled Hong Kong director, John Woo.Based on a story from Philip K Dick you just get a feeling that Total Recall (1990) did this a lot better even though Woo tips a hat to Hitchcock's North by Northwest here.Ben Affleck plays Michael Jennings, a reverse engineer in the near future. He gets a big pay cheque for figuring out how rival's products work for the corporations who hire him. The only catch is that after the job his memory is wiped so no one else can extract the information from his head.When an old friend of his (Aaron Eckhart) promises him a vast deal which means instant retirement for Jennings after the project he is tempted even though it will be three years of his life.After three years have passed, Jennings thinking he has over ninety million dollars in a safe deposit box is shocked to discover an envelope containing twenty items some mundane. Suddenly he is on the run from the FBI who want him for corporate theft and the goons from the company that hired him.Jennings needs to discover what he built during those three years, why would he trade so many millions for these items which all of a sudden become useful over a period of time. As if they were clues in unlocking a bigger puzzle.The film hints at the invention of a doomsday device which Jennings recognises the danger of and feels the need to stop it. Despite the hi tech near future setting this suddenly becomes a man with lost memories on the run with some ability to have glimpsed into the future.It lacks the bone crunching hard violence and humour of Total Recall or immersive story and dystopian style of Spielberg's Minority Report which also adapted from a Philip K Dick story.What we get is a routine action thriller as if Woo is really in it for the paycheck himself.

Stanley Jackson As someone with a scientific background, I am always on the lookout for gross errors in the scientific logic and principles shown in the scripts of movies. I wonder how a creative endeavour that lasted months, possibly years, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, can have flaws in it that could be identified by someone with a fairly modest knowledge of science. My conclusion is either that the entire creative team - scriptwriters, producers, directors etc. - were unaware of these mistakes, which I feel is unlikely, or that they choose to treat their audience disrespectfully and assume that they will either not be aware of or care about these errors. I find this arrogant attitude to be extremely condescending and irritating, as it diminishes the pleasure that I get from watching the movies.In the case of 'Paycheck' I will leave aside the time-travelling aspect and focus upon a 'real' science flaw, namely the explosion of the liquid hydrogen which is used in large quantities to, presumably, maintain the future-predicting machine at a constant, extremely low temperature.Hydrogen at room temperature is obviously highly flammable, burning extremely quickly by reacting with oxygen in the air in a rapid, energy-releasing combustion process. However, whether it would ignite so easily in the liquid state, namely at lower than minus 253 degrees C (minus 434 degrees F), is another matter entirely, but I will give the film makers the benefit of the doubt on this.Nevertheless, this begs two significant questions: firstly, why did the highly-intelligent scientists involved in the project choose liquid hydrogen to cool the equipment when there are several obvious non-flammable alternatives, such as liquid helium (lower than minus 269 C), liquid nitrogen (minus 196 C) or liquid oxygen (minus 183 C)? The cynical answer to this question is, of course, that their use would not enable the equipment to be destroyed, and the villains wiped out, by the detonation of a cleverly-placed bullet!My second question is this: if the cooling liquid surrounding the equipment was so flammable why were the villains so happy to use guns in the vicinity of their expensive facility? Guns are obviously excellent weapons to beat one's enemy, but not in a location where the deflection or ricochet of as little as a single bullet may result in the complete destruction of the very object that you are trying to protect, as well as the likely death of both the shooter of the gun and their intended target! It is, therefore, illogical that the villains would choose to use guns in this area of combat.

daniel-poirier-570-557312 What a fabulously stupid movie! I can't believe all the positive reviews issued previously by others (they must have been from 13-year-olds, or something).The storyline is lame and filled with stunningly impossible coincidences and the hero reaches conclusions that defy logic. The entire premise is just a pretext for Woo's usual abuse of explosions and flames.I'm shocked that the director (John Woo) could make even relatively good actors (Uma Thurman) appear to be one-dimensional and uninspired. Of course, the lame actors (Ben Affleck, Aaron Eckhart) are, well, lame... but I didn't expect much more from them - never seen them in any movie where the characters actually have some kind of depth to them.The movie isn't even bad enough to make it fun as only really bad movies can be (i.e. Attack of the killer tomatoes)...In short, rent it if you have $3 to waste, and even then, you may be upset about the waste of time.

SnoopyStyle In the near future, Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) is a brilliant engineer who is a hired gun reverse engineering technology for a price. After his work is done, his memory is erased by Shorty (Paul Giamatti). His former schoolmate billionaire James Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) offers him a big job that would last 2 or 3 years, but the longest memory wipe ever is no more than 8 weeks. John Wolfe (Colm Feore) is his henchman and Dr. Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman) works at his lab. When he comes out of his memory erasing, he finds $92M in his account. He goes to settle his account, but he finds that his personal items have been replaced and his shares have been forfeited four weeks ago. The FBI arrests him for treason and murder. They want him to implicate Rethrick since only his name is on the new patents but they don't have any memories to extract. He escapes and tries to find what happened in the lost 3 years.The sets don't look good enough especially that lab. The acting especially Affleck isn't good enough. His character is not particularly likable. He's a douche and I don't see the point of rooting for him. When Wolfe injects the marker, it's the perfect time to jump forward in time but the movie goes on for awhile despite the logic. The interrogation is laughable with the rotating chair and the escape is almost as bad. Overall, I like the ideas in the story which I attribute mostly to Philip K. Dick. John Woo isn't able to bring it to life. It feels a little like Face/Off but that movie reveled in its campiness. This one is suppose to be serious.