> > Dec 25 - Paycheck
> >
> > John Woo directs Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman in a sci-fi thriller with an amnesia subplot. Amnesia is a great device for stories like this, but Woo's fallen far from his heyday in Hong Kong.
>
> From the trailers, I thought this was more like Memento, but with explosions.
>
> -FP

The short story it's based on goes a little something like this: an engineer signs on to do some contract work for a research lab/industrial tech. company for a few years. He's gonna get paid fixty billion dollars, but the work is sensitive and they're worried about corporate espionage, so he has to agree to have his memories wiped about the two years he spends there.

So he wakes up, not knowing what he's been doing for two years, and he finds out that he's signed away his paycheck in exchange for an envelope full of random trinkets (some wire, bus tokens, a ticket stub, etc.). Of course, he has no idea why he's done this. He also finds he's wanted by the police, and again he doesn't know exactly why.

It's a cool premise, and the story is pretty entertaining even if the end sorta sucks (typical PKD syndrome). I had wanted to see it filmed until I learned John Woo was making it.

Stephen