Showing posts with label John Woo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Woo. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Paycheck: Both the film's title and why it exists

Paycheck (2003)
Starring: Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, and Colm Feore
Director: John Woo
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Industrial spy and computer engineer Michael Jennings (Affleck) agrees to work on a project so elaborate and top secret he'll have three entire years "cooked" from his brain by his partner (Giamatti) once he's done. However, instead of a big paycheck, Jennings finds assassins trying to kill him at the other end. Now, he has to recover what he's forgotten before it's too late, piecing together three years with only the minutes of clues.


I think that's a pretty accurate summary of this totally, utterly forgettable movie. I watched just three days ago, and I feel like it's been erased from my mind. I remember Affleck woefully inadequate acting talents being even more clearly on display when playing against real actors like Thurman and Giamatti (even though the latter had limited screen time). I remember a story so messy and full of holes that it resembled a block of swiss cheese being melted in the "brain cooker" device. I also remember John Woo (who once made the so-very-excellent action films "Hard Target" and "Hard Boiled") and feel a bit sad that he's reduced here to aping Hitchcock (in a way that's about as skillful as the way a chimp might mimick a person) and to desperately cramming his "signature visuals" into the film so it feels like he's almost parodying himself.

There's no doubt that everyone involved made this movie for no reason other than its title... they were looking for a paycheck, and they were hoping this messy pile would be forgotten as fast as one of Michael Jennings' special projects. It deserves to be forgotten, because its only saving grace is that it moves so fast that it's not until afterwards the audience fully realizes how awful a movie it is.



Monday, January 4, 2010

'Hard Target' is one that's worth hitting

Hard Target (1993)
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Kasi Lemmons, Chuck Pfarrer and Arnold Vosloo
Director: John Woo
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

When a young woman (Butler) hires a Cajun drifter (Van Damme) to help locate her father (Pfarrer) among the homeless of New Orleans, they become the latest targets of a group that organizes human hunts for twisted rich people.


Chance (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Nat (Yancy Butler) are on the run
from psychopaths who hunt humans on the streets of New Orleans in "Hard Target".

"Hard Target" is one of the very best action films of the 1990s and a high point in the careers of both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Lance Henriksen. The two men give excellent performances--with Van Damme showing great charisma and Henriksen giving his best performance as a bad guy save his role in the 1991 version of "The Pit and the Pendulum".

This is a film with a sharp script and even sharper action sequences. It's a film where the action set pieces--like a very exciting cemetary chase and a fantastic, extended battle in a warehouse--have been copied so many times that I suspect there are filmmakes out there borrowing from third and fourth generation sources with perhaps not having seen the original.

It's also one of the last truly good action films helmed by John Woo; after this point, he became so full of himself as a filmmaker and so wrapped up in "Woo-isms" that he reduced his stylistic signatures to jokes--like the unintentionally funny and completley inexplicable appearance of doves during a fight scene in "Mission Impossible II".

But, whatever ill winds blew across the careers of the principles involved with this picture later, "Hard Target" is an action movie classic.