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"If you show someone their future, they have no future!"

Good science-fiction can be implausible, it can be outlandish, it can be head-scratchingm it can be beyond the realm of all possibility. But one thing that it emphatically cannot be is ridiculous. When a sci-fi film -- especially an ambitious one -- loses the audience, the result is much more disastrous than when viewers turn on a romantic comedy, or a straight-forward action thriller. Everything on the screen, every futuristic flourish, every budgetary splurge or sacrifice, takes on a new and laughable dimension. John Woo's Paycheck is appealingly silly for most of the way, and then stunningly, unfathomably absurd in its climax. So completely does the film crumble that I can't even give it the usual pass for John Woo's typically stylish handling of the action. Minority Report, you may recall, was also based on a Philip K. Dick story; what did we see in Spielberg's film that is missing in Woo's?

One could point to the difference in plots; where Minority Report was metaphorical, potentially relevant and vaguely contemporary, Paycheck is pure fantasy, a happy-go-lucky amalgam of archetypical sci-fi elements -- this may be the only time you see a device that predicts the future using -- wait for it -- a laser. But then again no: more facetious does not automatically imply inferior, and for at least the first two acts, there is every reason to believe that Paycheck is gleefully aware of its own carnival ride nature. It is in the third act, when it's time to put up or shut up, that the movie abandons all pretense of coherent storytelling. It doesn't shut up soon enough.

The plot is quintessential Philip K. Dick: Mike Jennings (Ben Affleck), a brilliant computer technician, makes his living reverse-engineering technologies for companies who later erase his memory of the work. His wealthy entrepreneur friend Jimmy (Aaron Eckhart) offers him the opportunity to do one last job and be set for life -- an eight-figure paycheck, no guilt, and no need to ever work again. Mike reluctantly accepts, but becomes much more excited about the prospect when he meets Rachel (Uma Thurman), a sexy biologist working in the same building. Once he is done, he thinks, they can start a life together, and soon enough they'll have little toddlers running around, living off his big fat pay day.

Alas, when they zap Mike's memory and he goes to pick up his check for 92 million dollars, he finds that he money has been replaced by an envelope consisting of twenty mysterious and seemingly useless items, and that he was the one who made that switch. Huh. Soon enough, he is being chased through streets, alleys, subway tunnels, and secure government buildings, and shockingly, each one of the items in the envelope comes in handy at precisely the right time. Huh!

It's a corker of a set-up, and for a while the film just surfs on the waves of its mystery. Once the solution is revealed the film, predictably, goes downhill. The secret itself (which I've already blown in the second paragraph, so if you didn't heed the spoiler warning, you have only yourself to blame) isn't entirely uninteresting, but it leaves the movie with absolutely nowhere to go; the only way I can see for this to have worked would have been to stick the revelation at the end, but then again, it's doubtful that any screenwriter could have kept it a secret for that long.

John Woo has many passionate admirers in film fandom, but don't count me among them. His skill for staging shoot-outs and chases is considerable, but it does not extend to storytelling; in all of Woo's films that I have seen (and to be fair, I've only seen a couple of his acclaimed Hong Kong features), the plotting has been at best functional, a clothesline for things to explode and people to die. This deficit is particularly apparent when Woo ventures outside his genre; Windtalkers, a war movie starring Nicolas Cage, was positively tortuous.

Paycheck, though more attuned to Woo's sensibilities than something like Windtalkers, is neither essentially plotless like Mission: Impossible 2 nor gimmicky like Face/Off. It required careful handling, but Woo attacks it like I attack pastry. The closing scenes reach unspeakable heights of absurdity and excess; there is actually a scene wherein the central nemeses are armed with guns but spontaneously decide to drop them and engage in a fistfight. And I don't think I even need to mention the abuse that temporal paradoxes take at the hands of screenwriter Dean Greogaris (Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life) and, I suspect to a smaller extent, Philip K. Dick.

Add to that the fact that Ben Affleck is still no action hero and that tremendous assets like Paul Giamatti and Uma Thurman are given absolutely nothing to do, and what you have is pretty crummy sci-fi (not to mention a weird Christmas-time release). This is probably the worst Philip K. Dick adaptation yet; even the shoddy Impostor, dumped into theaters in early January, handled its premise with more aplomb.