Paycheck It Forward

Each year, Christmas brings with it some blockbuster film. For a few years in a row, it was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Last Christmas, it was King Kong. Peter Jackson has been owning the Christmas season for a while. Admittedly, most of the films start just before Christmas, so eager fans don't have to make a decision between their savior (or its paganist offerings) and their action hero,

On Christmas Day, however, someone manages to release a film, often without much fanfare, in the hopes someone, somewhere, somehow, will care to watch this. A few years ago, this film was Paycheck. Based on a Philip K. Dick short (like Michael J. Fox, Mr. Dick is never without his middle initial) and directed by Hong Kong action director, John Woo, this film flew under most people's radar, and there was no desire for many to watch a post-Gigli film with Ben Afflect. In fact, I didn't even remember his female co-star. That happens to be Uma Thurman.

I expected the film to be so-so, hopefully, bad enough that it's good, though it doesn't quite reach that. It is a lot of fun, but not terribly satisfying.

Ah, the plot. OK, basically, Affleck plays a "reverse engineer" who figures out how things work, usually in a clean room, spends two months on the job, and then has his memory wiped, so people won't know he did it. His latest accomplishment is a 3D monitor. His best friend, a ruthless megalomaniac played by Aaron Eckhart, wants him to spend not two months, but three years working on a super secret project, at which point, he'll make enough money to retire on.

When the job is done and he goes to collect his huge paycheck, he finds his collection of items, which he had to give up before starting the project, and realizes it's not what he put there in the first place, and thus begins the adventure of why these items are there, and eventually, how he uses everyone of them to help him figure out what he will do to survive.

At this point, it's something of a gimmick movie. He has 20 items, and he must use them in one incredulous way after another. Oh, and lest you think he's forgotten about Daredevil, he's shown training with a long stick, which serves what use for an engineer? You never know when he has to fight off a bunch of bad guys, who are the most patient shooters ever.

Uma Thurman plays a biologist, but of the sort that seems to know a great deal about botany and raising plants, and has a weather machine device of some sort, whose purpose appears mostly to be used later in the plot, much like Affleck's ninja skills. Apparently, Affleck managed to get in his love of the Red Sox in the film by quizzing his possible girlfriend about his favorite baseball team.

Matt Damon was apparently offered the role first, but he had already done his "amnesia" movie (namely, The Bourne Identity), and so recommended this to his buddy, Ben. Thanks, Matt, that's what friends are for. Suffice it to say, the film wouldn't have been helped that much by better actors, well, maybe it would have been. Imagine, for instance, that they cast, say, Ian McKellen and Vanessa Redgrave. I think, that alone, would create a much more interesting picture.

Poor John Woo. Will he never spot a film in English that's any good? I've always been a bit suspicious of John Woo movies. Characters are drawn in this "operatic" style, of ambiguously good vs. ambiguously evil. Most Hong Kong directors have a hard time making sophisticated characters. The sole exception, off the top of my head, is Wong Kar Wai. He seems to work in a completely different universe than Woo or Tsui Hark.

Despite the general awfulness of the film, the gimmick, which is, how does he use the 20 items to save his life and that of his blond girlfriend, is intriguing, even if, at every step, it seems impossible to use the clues. Let's face it, many elements of this film were far better done in Minority Report, which also uses a "see into the future" to tell the story, and the ability to predict into the near future as a plot element. I had no idea Dick was into telling sci-fi stories involving seeing into the future, if not living the future.

There's another Philip K. Dick movie coming up. Richard Linklater, who directed both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, is directing this film, which is done in a rotoscope style, a la Waking Life. It stars Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder. Rotoscope was a style that was used in the 70s, where live video was essentially traced over to create cartoons that looked life like in motion, but not lifelike in quality. It made you realize, of course, that real cartoons, completely drawn by people, have extremely stylized movements. And, yet, despite being traced, the movements have an odd quality to it that makes you think it's weird, even if you wouldn't notice it with live action.

Rotoscoping has generally been considered a lower form of animation, which is why you don't see it much these days. Waking Life was based on some work that Linklater had discovered, and involves a kind of faux rotoscoping, where people's features, their noses, mouths, eyebrows, float as if not fully attached to their faces, creating a dreamlike state, which was quite suited to the topic of Waking Life, which appears to be about death.

Since Dick was noted for writing books where the reader is unsure as to his reality, this form of rotoscoping should also be successful for A Scanner Darkly. This is, to my knowledge, Linklater's first attept at science fiction, though other people, such as Sodebergh (who I always seem to associate with Linklater, even though Sodebergh is a far more talented director, and Linklater much more an observer of how people act and talk, and is less concerned about plot in a conventional sense) have dabbled once (his version of Solaris, based on a Andrei Tarkovsky film from the 70s, which itself was based on a book by some Russian author).

If Paycheck succeeds, it's because it doesn't try to be that profound. It's basically a puzzle movie, good guys against bad guys. Unlike Affleck's character, our payoff is not nearly as good for waiting til the end of the movie.