I just watched this yesterday. Even though, clearly, taking a Phillip Dick story and giving it to John Woo to transform into a “motorcycle x cars” chase movie is a serious blasphemy, i have to admit, this is a cool flic.
Ben Afflec and Uma Thurman don’t spoil it by trying to act. The special effects are plentiful, awesome, and “old school”: no computer animation. I have to say, these people are crazy.
John Woo gets to do his emblematic “two guys sticking a gun in each other’s face” scene twice.
I did like the movie. It stands up very well all by itself as a great action flick.
However, if I try to examine it as a Philip Dick movie, it leaves much to be desired.
First of all, placing the film into, what amounts to a current-day setting, just feels wierd. As the film opened, it had a very “PD” feel to it, but by the time the chase sequences / gunplay et. all. started, it lost the feel entirely.
I am never one to complain about a director taking liberties with a story, even extensive liberties - just so long as the bones of the plot are still there and mostly recognizable. I also love John Woo. I just wish that he could have broken from his mold just a bit to make a PD film feel like a PD/John Woo film, and not just a John Woo film.
That is the Serenity, a Firefly class cargo ship - from the excellent, but short-lived (thanks to the miserable excuses for humanity at Fox) TV series Firefly.
The whole series is avalible on DVD for $49 if you are interested in checking it out. Highly recommended. It’s kind of like frontier/cowboys/pirates in outer space - plus it has excellent plot and character development.
I enjoyed Paycheck quite a bit, and its actually what got me interested in checking out PD in the first place, I still havent actually read paycheck, it will be interesting to see where the story changes. Since Woo’s signature moves have been brought up though, I might as well point out his infamous “dove flying through the door” trademark towards the end of the movie.
