Last week; a deplorable event occurred: I watched the movie “Paycheck” by John Woo. Actually, it was more like a soup of cliches than a movie. Let’s start with the director John Woo, who also directed MI-2, Windtalkers, Face-off…
I suppose John Woo is one of the major action directors currently in the film industry. He used to have a good sense of kinetic energy in his movies but he is getting worse and more mundane as his films go one. This time with Paycheck, he passed over the visual effects easily and filled the movie with ordinary chase and noisy eruption scenes. To be honest, Paycheck caused me severe physical and emotional suffering!. During the movie; I felt scratchy, uncomfortable and stupid since I couldn’t believe that I actually paid good money to see this movie.
Screenwriting…
In fact, there is no screenwriting. With “very little” effort, J. Woo produced extremely ordinary action scenes, along with just a lot of stupid dialogue, all bunched together. This, I believe, is all the fault of the screenwriter, Dean Georgaris. Has he ever written a good dialogue? Take for example Lara Croft Tomb Raider-II. You decide. There is this clever engineer (Ben Affleck-haha) and a big company who uses his experiences and knowledge for it’s own, secret desires: How do they do this? Our engineer works for them for 3 years. Then the company authorities erase his memory, very much like a floppy disk, from the time he started to work with them. After the formatting is completed, time passes and through the help of some hints, Affleck realizes that during the past 3 years, he invented a time machine where you can see your future. That’s how he found those hints. He saw the future on the machine and left hints for his future, during the time he was employed by the “Evil” company.
Then he finds out that this machine will bring the end of the World; thus, our hero destroys the machine and saves us. As an example, take this dialogue between Affleck and Uma Thurman (who plays Affleck’s lover). Affleck says emotionally: “Honey, I should destroy this machine. Go! Leave your life. And always remember me!”…
Don’t worry Ben! We will definitely remember you! I beg you all, let’s gather some money and get rid of Ben Affleck. Instead of saving the world, he should think about acting lessons! Not only Ben, but Uma Thurman as well was awful. I am strongly disappointed considering her performance in Kill Bill.
I wish J. Lopez had played the character rather than Uma since Ben and Jennifer fit well together in their terrible acting.

Atilla Karakurum (IE/III)