Paycheck

Ben Asslick, I mean Affleck, doesn't know what's going on. His character, that is. It's unproven whether Ben himself is all a bit simple. And anyway the character isn't simple, he's a technical clever bastard who reverse engineers people's technological breakthroughs then has his memory wiped in order to protect himself and his employer from prosecution. Have you worked out this is based on a Philip K. Dick story yet?

Uma Furface is his lovely love interest who is a doctor of plants and weather or something. She is utterly under-used and could just as well be a plant pot. Or an icicle.

Aaron Eccles Cake is the naughty bad employer bastard mean naughty horrid ooh he's such a bad guy.

Am I laying it on a bit thick here? Well maybe but that's nothing to the heavy hand with which John Woo (what's that Tom Cruise, he's 'the Woo'?) directs. Far too many close-ups on Affuck's expressionless face, way too few well written or delivered lines of dialogue, an excess of explosions and motorbike bullshit, a repeated cutaway of a slo-mo bullet spinning towards its target. In the future.

It's all about designing a machine to predict the future then, if you're Benbo, realising this is a terrible thing, almost like removing hope from Pandora's box and letting Cassandra dictate all world policy forever (yes, I've read some Greek mythology, why do you ask?). So Ben, knowing his memory will be wanked away leaves himself clues and items to help him work out what he wants to tell himself post memory wipe so he can kill the machine and stop Aaron Ecky Thump from ruining the world.

Pah! Kill them all, I say. Especially if John Woo can somehow be all killed in the process. Or, if not all killed then killed enough in the mind tank to make him forget he's a film director. Perhaps he could take up fishmongery? I don't really care what career he pursues, just trying to pretend I don't wish the people behind terrible films dead. Even though I often do.

Quite why Thurman or Paul Giamatti should have chosen to associate themselves with this shit escapes reason. Did Woo sell it as a futuristic Memento? If he did he lied. Fishmongery's loss is also cinema's loss.