"Paycheck" endorsed, sort of

Guys, something in me just resists Ben Affleck movies. I don’t know why. I mean, he’s no Robert DeNiro, but then again he’s no worse of an actor than a lot of other movie stars out there. So what is it? Why this tissue rejection every time I see one of his movies? After all, I like Matt Damon movies well enough so I should like Ben Affleck movies, right?

Whatever it is, I’ve tried to get past it. Believe it or not, but there are times when I really do want to like him. Really. I mean, he’ll make a complete piece of shit movie like Sum of All Fears where I’ll walk away thinking that, for the good of the free world, Ben Affleck must die. Then, he’ll host Saturday Night Live and be funny as all hell. He’ll be self-effacing and warm. He’ll sift and poke around the wreckage of his J-Lo misadventure and joke about it. He was warm and funny on SNL, after which I thought okay well, maybe I’ve just been too hard on him. After all, he was pretty good in Good Will Hunting. That’s something, right?

Then, just as I beginning to warm up to him a bit, the little fuckwit will do something like go and stand up in front of the U.S. Senate to lecture all assembled on the inequities of the minimum wage. The fact that he’s a Hollywood nitwit who labors under the delusion that the Republic needs the insights of a young millionaire such as himself when debating how much to pay its burger flippers and toilet scrubbers doesn’t really make him unique. After all, both Tim Robbins and Alec Baldwin have trod this ground before and done it better than him. Robbins and Baldwin – say what you will about them (and I hate their guts) – at least seem to know what they’re talking about when they get out there to push their pet causes. I saw the tape of Ben’s Senate speech and he looked for all the world like Ted Kennedy’s sock puppet. Thus, I’m back to where I started; Ben Affleck must die.

As you can imagine, I rented Paycheck with low expectations. However, there were as I saw it 2 reasons to at least hold out some hope for this movie. One was that adaptations of Philip K. Dick stories usually made pretty good movies (e.g., Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc.). The second reason can be summed up in one word:

Uma.

Somehow, the job of propping up Affleck’s lifeless carcass in this movie fell to the goddess of all creation, Uma Thurman. And I thought if anyone could redeem a Ben Affleck movie, Black Mamba could. Did she? Well . . . .

Honestly, the movie’s not that bad. It’s not good, mind you, but it’s not as bad as other Affleck efforts. It completely butchered Dick’s story of course, but I expected that (I was really into Philip K. Dick back in college – my nerd days – because his stories are so weird; too weird though for anyone except maybe David Lynch to make a movie out of, at least one that’s a reasonably close adaptation. The only one I can think who even tried was Cameron Crowe with Vanilla Sky and the results of that one were decidedly mixed). So even though the movie had your typical hero-saves-the-world-and-gets-the-girl ending, I wasn’t too upset when I came to it.

This one’s typical John Woo fare, meaning that you’re going to see lots of bullets flying, cars crashing and shit blowing up. For example, when a bullet punctures a hydrogen tank in a computer lab, it makes an explosion that looked to me to be big enough to take out all of downtown Houston. I don’t know about y’all but I am sick to death of explosions in movies, at least the kind that look this fake. Anyway, though Uma disappointed me by NOT taking out her samurai sword and lopping off any of Ben’s limbs, she was still gorgeous to look at when she was on screen. Ben read his lines and smiled on cue and lots of people shot at and chased him and lots of shit blew up. At the end of it all, though I couldn’t remember any significant plot lines a half hour later, it was not a totally unenjoyable 2 hour diversion. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to see it but if you have nothing better to do, it’s not a bad way to kill 2 hours.

Thus, out of a whole six-pack, I’d give this one 2 ½ beers.