Tuesday, January 13


Go get it, I'll come back for you.
OK, I'll be quick.
I got it.


Minor Spoilers

To be honest I'm not really sure if that's the actual dialog I'm thinking of from Paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, the point is the dialog from that scene (motorcycle and car chase through a constuction area) really was that bland. It was even worse then that, it was laughably bland.

Paycheck was a strange movie. It was all at once smart and dumb. They managed to be good with time paradoxes, and clever with this idea of trying to change your future knowing that you won't remember anything when the changing needs to happen. There are some logical holes in there (there always are with time travel type stuff) but the movie mostly avoids them by not trying to explain everything. This one is very much about being along for the ride instead of explicity exploring new ideas about time.

So they have all this great stuff with Ben Affleck showing that his character is very clever and smart. And it would have been wonderful if he'd been able to continue that throughout the movie, escaping situations by being smart. Instead there was this dichotomy, the Affleck before the memory wipe was smart and clever while the Affleck after the memory wipe is dumb. Notice that he doesn't do anything clever that wasn't set up for him by his previous self - this annoyed me. Uma Thurman though was able to be clever, and continued that all the way through to the final fight scene.

And on top of all of it Affleck really isn't that good of an action star. He just looks clunky doing all that stuff. John Woo tried to make him look good, but he just wasn't working with the kind of talent he had with say Chow Yun Fat (or even, movie gods help me, Jean Claude...)


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