Paycheck Review

2003 wasn't a good year for Ben Affleck: first there was the rather lacklustre "Daredevil," then the downright appalling "Gigli," not to mention the exhausting on-off weddings shenanigans with current squeeze, Jennifer Lopez. So who better than the man behind "Mission Impossible II," action supremo John Woo, to relaunch his faltering career? Well, that was the plan anyway. Using a short story by "Minority Report" and "Bladerunner" writer Philip K. Dick as inspiration, the pair have come up with a badly executed and half-baked sci-fi flick which sees Affleck star as a genius engineer whose brain gets wiped after every top-secret corporate job he completes. Expecting a handy eight-figure paycheque after completing his latest three-year-long project, Ben wakes up with no cheque, no memory of fiancée Uma Thurman or what he's been up to and an envelope of apparently useless objects which, he discovers, has been sent back in time from the future. And then the FBI and his former employers start hunting him down.

What's most frustrating is that at almost every moment in this movie, you can glimpse a better film desperately trying to get out. Indeed, the central concept of a man puzzling out the use of a variety of objects just in time to save his own neck could have made a little corker of a thriller. But Affleck is all too depressingly woeful, Thurman weak and underused and, most surprisingly for Woo, even the action sequences fail to go off with a bang. Affleck will, no doubt, be wishing the memory of this dud could be erased from the record.