Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Paycheck (2003)
Director: John Woo
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
In Paycheck, the amount offered to ace reverse-engineer Michael Jennings (Affleck) to effect one of his speciality semi-legal high-tech rip-offs is a paltry $93m and a memory wipe. You could hardly make a John Woo sci-fi thriller for that. Well, you just might if you concentrated the action in one Bond-like mega-set and rationed the contra-flow car chases, fireballs and terminus getaways. In his adaptation of Philip K Dick's 1953 short story about a machine that can read the future, Woo choreographs all the aforementioned with his customary muscular élan, but there's a sense of treading water about this movie. Further, the self-referential tropes - the face-off gun duels, slo-mo bullet trajectories and the like - seem less like cinematic in-jokes than nervous insurance policies, delivered with an absence of humour. Yet for all the inevitable inconsistencies and implausibilities of the script, this ain't all bad. The design is good; Affleck is at his least smug and nauseating. And Thurman, as the kick-boxing biologist lover who helps fend off both corporate assassins and FBI, wields the meanest handbag since Jack Lemmon.Author: WH
Cast & crew
Director: John Woo
Producer: John Davis, Michael Hackett, John Woo, Terence Chang
Cast: Ben Affleck, Aaron Eckhart, Uma Thurman, Paul Giamatti, Colm Feore, Joe Morton, Michael C Hall, Peter Friedman, Kathryn Morris, Ivana Milicevic, Christopher Kennedy full cast
Genre(s): Thrillers
Duration: 119 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now