I just saw this tonight, and my only question is what the hell happened to John Woo? He was once cool and stylish, right?
Lame adaptation of a cool Philip K. Dick story. Baffleck is all wrong, and I’m getting sick of him in all these movies. It’s like he’s in every third flick that gets released. And if you hated Daredevil, you’re going to have ugly flashbacks early on.
Uma is a sexy woman, but not in this movie. They saddle her with a really bad haircut, and you can just tell that she’s a better actor than what she was saddled with as a leading man.
Oh, there’s the obligatory John Woo Dove in slow mo, but otherwise this just feels like another lame Hollywood sci-fi movie.
Ha, I knew this would suck. The trailer was awesome because it’s such a cool idea for a story. I didn’t realize it was a Dick story, but that explains that.
The sheer stupidity of this movie was hard to bear, but it was made worse by some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen. It’s just amazing how horrible an actor Ben Affleck is. He barely moved his face the entire movie, and I’m not sure he ever said anything that wasn’t a monotone.
Of course the script was horrible, but even with a bad script an actual actor could have managed a small amount of emotion somewhere. Even Keanu Reeves has more charisma than Ben Affleck, and bizarre as it may be to consider the possibility that Reeves is a superior actor to someone, Affleck is worse, at least in this movie.
This movie was so bad it somehow managed to spill over onto Kill Bill and make it worse because seeing Uma Thurman reading her dumb-ass lines in Paycheck was so painful. I realize that Affleck wouldn’t recognize a good script if it bit him, but you’d think maybe Thurman would have more sense? I guess not…
Not only did the movie lack any logical continuity between scenes, not only was the plot nonsensical when considered as a whole, not only did the movie contain so much senseless action and vapid dialogue as to confuse any rational viewer, but there wasn’t even a single scene that made sense by itself standing alone.
Oh yeah, and John Woo made this movie? Well, apart from some lame and really almost inexplicable martial arts sequences, and one of his goddam stupid birds flying into a scene for no apparent reason, I’d have guessed that William Shatner did it…
While I lack the obligatory hipster hatred of Ben Affleck(yeah, he’s more famous, better looking, and richer than you. Cope.), Jesus Christ.
This is by far the worst Woo movie I’ve ever seen, and I hated Face/Off and whatnot. He’s has been coasting on reputation for like a decade now. It’s probably the worst movie any of the principals have ever been associated with.
Woo is prone to be hilariously overstupid in that Asian way that Western movies cannot reach, even in his good films, but this movie looks like a gag reel. Also, it was annoying how hard this movie tried to be PG-13.
Really spoils a decent premise, though the premise is(spoiler!) completely invalidated by the events of the movie, for no good reason. Also, it appears that all the dialogue was translated into and out of some other language, possibly 2 or 3 times. I cannot believe that this script got real actors and actual budget behind it, it’s that insipid.
I remember reading the Philip K. Dick story one late night in college. Sitting in my office on campus, 1 am. Guess it helps if your mind is tired. Really seemed cool, but it doesn’t translate well to film.
And, like, the entire opening sequence made no sense. So Corporation A hires him to reverse engineer Corporation B’s revolutionary, first-of-it’s-kind 3D monitor. They lock him into a room, and what does he use to reverse engineer the 3D monitor? A friggin’ 3D monitor! Didn’t anyone realize that?
I couldn’t even finish Windtalkers before I had to return it to the video store. Zzzzzzzz. And that has never happened to me with an action movie. I thought Broken Arrow was way over-the-top. Face/Off was stylish, but extremely silly.
Has anyone done Dick right? Spielberg butchered the ending of Minority Report. The short story has a cool ending that sets up one of those great conundrums, but I guess they were afraid that the average IQ level of Joe Schmo wouldn’t be up to the task, so they turned it into an episode of Murder She Wrote.
First hour was decent, then it veerly into so-so territory.
As for complaining about Uma Thurman being in the film, please reference the title. Same can be said for Paul Giamatti and Aaron Eckhart being in the film.
Paycheck is very similiar to Windtalkers, good start, poor finish.
Woolen Horde- I’ve never read the story Minority Report was based on, but I don’t think Spielburg butchered the ending, in fact I think the ending was pretty clever. How did the story end?
There’s a logical conundrum that no one foresaw when they set up the precogs. There are three precogs, and two of them predicted Anderton killing someone. But it turns out that they were wrong, and it all hinged on the third precog (the minority report.) It’s one of those classic Dick themes about fate and predestination.
It was so disappointing to go the other route. So the story went from a meditation about fate, to “the butler did it.”
That’s, what, just about everybody in Hollywood? Sorry, I know you thought that was a badass line, but it sounds more like something his mother would say to the paparazzi.
Snarky! I’m willing to forgive Lee the occasional stinker, given the man’s range. When you take a lot of chances and constantly try new things, eventually you are going to have a flop or two.
Here’s the thread that talked about Minority Report and the alternate ending mentioned in this thread. There might be another but I cannot find it at the moment.
Christmas night a friend and I were both sick of our big families so we snuck off to this. At one point I leaned over and said, “Why is there cheesey stage fog all over the floor?”
Ben and Uma then used the stage fog to hide from the evil guards.
“Oh, that’s why there’s stage fog all over the floor.”
Woolen- As mentioned, the movie “ends” when Cruise’s character is put into jail. As the jailkeeper had mentioned earlier in the film, while inside all your dreams come true.
My favorite part of Paycheck was the countdown from the first poorly inserted stick training scene until Affleck’s character actually got to stick fight. The inevitablity of it was just edge-of-my-seat tension.
Jobe- People hate Ben Affleck because he’s constantly in the news because of the high-profile courtship. He’s not a great actor, but he’s better than Reeves, and a lot of others. He’s more hated than, say, Paul Walker or Vin Diesel or whatever simply because of the J Lo thing and the wunderkid looks.
No desire to see this. I think Blade Runner is the only Dick adaption that I’ve actually liked. I hated Minority Report, that movie was terrible. Logically inconsistant, and it’s whole presentation of the future (minus the follow you marketing) was dumb.
Cool idea but it seemed like no one involved with the production tried at all. Phoned in on every level almost to the point of embarrassment. Woo looked bored with this one.
Perhaps the title is some meta-irony among the Hollywood elite, as it did appear that everyone involved was in it in just for the titular piece of paper.
Paycheck is the first film I’ve walked out on since Scream 2. I had absolutely nothing to do yesterday except kill a few hours, and given my exceedling low expectations, this film couldn’t even do that. Utterly shitful.
