Movie Note: Paycheck
Two weeks ago, Paycheck got a rave review from Kathleen’s brother. When I finally got round to watching it, I was impressed, because the intelligence of the puzzle always rose above the cartoon violence. I ordered it from Amazon right away, and the DVD arrived this afternoon. Kathleen was dead tired, but Paycheck woke her up. When it was over, though, she went right back to sleep. I was unable to engage her in a double feature. The second film would have been Untraceable.
Both movies involve a lot of violence, but the violence is not the same kind of violence. Paycheck is a glorious comic book, perhaps the first one ever to be captured on film. Almost every settled frame is a bande dessiné image. There’s no doubt of the ultimate winner. You could almost say that Aaron Eckhart’s more chiseled features doom him from the moment you note the chiseled cleft in his chin.
Paycheck is an amazingly masculine movie because it combines cartoon violence with a genuinely arresting puzzle. Untraceable is a woman’s movie because women have been kicked around a lot. The violence in Untraceable — like that of Copycat, another woman’s picture — is horrific. Dreadful things not only happen but register as such. Both movies not only involve but are built around kidnappings. Paycheck’s hero evades capture by means of tricks that the monsters in Untraceable and Copycat would have foreseen and forestalled. Aaron Eckhart has played a lot of nasty men, but to date his serial murders have been strictly metaphorical.
Would I sign over my brains in exchange for Ben Affleck’s looks? I ask the question only because I used to look something like him, when I was young, and what I envy most is his getting away with fleshy stupidity — God knows I didn’t. I don’t mean that Ben Affleck himself is stupid. I will always revere his performance in Hollywoodland. But this movie has the wit to change the question: would I trade my looks for Michael Jennings’s brains?