Paycheck

John Woo directs the sci-fi action thriller Paycheck, based on a story written by Philip K. Dick in 1953. Waking up with his short-term memory erased, engineer Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) learns that he has been doing highly secretive work for the last three years in exchange for billions of ...more

As calculated as it is perfunctory, this John Woo sci-fi thriller submits a decent cast to the indignities of silly pseudo-science, snoozy action sequences and a smarmy, tacked-on epilogue. The high-concept premise comes straight from the Phillip K. Dick source material, but it's been transformed into something so slick and overly clever that the entire story crumbles under the weight of its pretensions. That'd be fine if the filmmakers seemed to care about filling their frame with gorgeously ...more