Memory Loss
Ben Affleck stars as a brilliant reverse engineer that is capable of taking one companies product, reverse engineering it, and making improvements on it so that a competiting company can enter and take over the market share of the first company. Affleck’s character, Michael Jennings, has no particular loyalty to a single company and consents to having his short term memory erased just as soon as he completes his contract. This formula has worked well enough for him thus far, but his most recent job will change his life forever.
During a social gathering, Jennings meets up with a long time friend of his played by Aaron Eckhart. Eckhart plays Rethrick, an executive of Allcom, a high tech company. He wants to offer Jennings an eight figure deal in exchange for a three year committment. Three years is a very long contract in Jennings’ line of work, and he’s unsure of the memory erasure risks that awaits him in the end, but he decides to take the job.
Fast forward three years, and Jennings is prepared to complete his contract and receive his paycheck. Instead, he’s told that he forfeited his paycheck during the three year project, but he has no memory of this. He’s given only an envelope of twenty possessions that he gave up three years earlier and he’ll spend the rest of the two hour feature trying to figure out the importance of these items.
Jennings was apparently also involved with Rachel, another scientist at Allcom, but he cannot remember this relationship. Together, Jennings and Rachel begin an action packed adventure to recover Jenning’s memory and his paycheck.
I like storylines that involve flashbacks or where events from the future connect to the past, or vice versa, this can be an especially potent formula in a game for example. To me, that was the most intriguing aspect of this film because I had a hard time being convinced by all of the ‘whiz-bang’ sci-fi technology used in Paycheck. Of course, being a John Woo film there is also a lot of action, and those scenes are well done, but they aren’t outstanding — they alone aren’t enough to make up for what I would overall consider a pretty generic and only mildly interesting story. As far as acting and casting, no major complaints, but I just wasn’t captivated by the overt sci-fi storyline (not that sci-fi isn’t interesting to me, it just felt too silly or unbelieveable in this film, kind of like The One).
Paycheck On Blu-ray
This Blu-ray release of Paycheck has a good to very good presentation quality about it. It’s a fairly recent film, so you would expect a good picture, and that’s what you get here. There are quite a few scenes with various sci-fi devices or effects, plenty of colors and what not, and those look good. The overall crispness of the image is noticebly good and the colors look vibrant. The audio is driven by a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track; Paycheck has a nice mix of dialogue and action scenes, and in either event I didn’t notice anything too off, if at all, with the audio.
The extra features on Paycheck aren’t terrible exciting and contain no new material. The extras include:
-Audio Commentary with Director John Woo
-Audio Commentary with Screenwriter Dean Georgaris
–Paycheck: Designing the Future – A nearly twenty minute feature in SD with interviews and clips of the cast and crew — this plays out like a twenty minute advertisement basically.
-Tempting Fate: The Stunts of Paycheck – This runs about fifteen minutes and is the most interesting extra feature included. It’s in SD, but the content is good as the stunt crew talks show and lots of production footage is shown.
-Extended / Deleted Scenes – Several extra scenes provide an additional ten minutes of content.
Overall, this is a very straight-forward Blu-ray release — no new extras, a very good presentation, and what I would consider a strictly average film. Let’s get to the summary…