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.

Mission Impossible 2

Person in slow motion sliding across the floor sideways whilst firing two handguns. Check. Antagonist and protagonist hurtling towards one another on motorbikes like medieval knights charging their steeds in a joust. Check. Explosions in contained spaces. Check. A billion bullets flying about a small room without ever actually hitting anyone. Check. This must be a John Woo movie.

It is. If you watch it on DVD, somewhere in the extras Tom Cruise offers a fascinating insight into the directorial philosophy of the master of the hard-boiled action movie when he reveals that "He's the Woo!" Thanks Tom, I feel enlightened.

Dougray Scott is an MI agent gone rogue. Thandie Newton is gorgeousness in various dresses and handy with some nifty driving and thieving. A manufactured super virus is up for sale to the highest bidder and Ethan Hunt must ignore the possibility of his name being used as rhyming slang and destroy the samples before Scott gets his hand on them.

Whoops, not quite all destroyed. There is one left when the bullets begin to really fly. So Thandie injects it into herself. Silly woman, she's got twenty hours left to live, no antidote as that is in the hands of the prospective buyer, and Cruise hasn't killed Scott yet.

Helicopters, flash bombs, masks to pretend to be somebody else, the motorbike stuff, exploding cars, trucks crashing into things, massive martial arts flavoured fist fight on the beach. It's all here, but becomes just an endless parade of implausible spectacle making the end credits something of a relief. As is the fact that Cruise gets the antidote to Newton in time. Sort of. Might have been a darkly shocking ending if she'd just died.

Yeah, yeah, it's all beautifully filmed, the panoramic shots and the tightly controlled fight scenes contrasting almost too perfectly as though Woo wanted to provide a how to do actions movies guide for student directors. One that Roland Emmerich would benefit from, granted, but isn't especially necessary otherwise.

Soon Hollywood would discover Bourne and this kind of film would never be quite the same again. Don't believe me, then watch Daniel Craig's last two outings as Bond and Cruise's last two appearances as Hunt. Better ways of spending your afternoon than watching this misfiring but stylish curate's egg of a movie.