Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Paycheck ::
by Forrest Grump
I remember The Killer, and I
remember Hard Boiled. I remember when John Woo made action movies in
which Mafia hitmen and crooked cops laid waste to maniacal dirt-bags, blasting
them to hell with twin .45s and influencing everything from the Matrix to
Max Payne.
Much the same as a person will hear of Orson Wells, as an old grump, doing
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, and remembering that here was a man who shook the
world with War of the Worlds, and single-handedly changed the way a
camera is held with Citizen Kane, we can now look at the formerly great
John Woo, and feel that same sunken sadness. Paycheck is a shoddy
caricature of a John Woo movie. I refuse to believe he done it. Alan Smithee and
John Dough have him tied up in a basement somewhere, and they are forcing him to
sign his name (Lips Mannilis style) too bad, bad work. This is not to say that
Woo is the only offender. Uma Thurman, looking just as she did in the brilliant
Kill Bill, also slogs along with an unworkable script. Ben Affleck does
his usual ('nuff said there). It is not that I have just seen a shitty action
movie that bothers me, its the idea that the people involved are capable of so
much more.
The movie is an amnesia story, in which Ben Affleck has his memory erased for a
reason, then provides himself with clues to figure out what that reason is. The
sad thing is, the story kind of makes sense. If this movie had been more of a
psychological drama, it could have really scored, but this movie tries to be an
action flick. Problem there is it is a long time before anything exciting
happens; there is no opening "wow" sequence to grab your attention.
The action, when it does come, is laughably bad. Dude, seriously, guns are made
for shooting people. Affleck gets chased, Affleck grabs gun, Affleck gets shot
at, Affleck clubs someone with gun. Ok, Macgyver-esque aversion to shooting
people? Oddly enough, not to beating their brains in with a monkey wrench or
blowing people up with a bomb? Ok I can buy that, it did work for Angus Macgyver,
but this is Jon WOO!
Crap comes in many packages. Sometimes, a couple of stars, one off a huge hit,
one off the biggest turd of the year, get together with a legendary director.
They produce a product that, through name recognition alone, assures them a
PAYCHECK.
D+ and that is generous.
