Take This Ben Affleck And Shove It*
(* Johnny Paycheck wrote a song called "Take This Job And Shove It". Hope that's more clear now.)
Whenever I think of movies like this, I think of the cool voice over voice that goes with it. It's deep and dramatic. I wonder if the voice over guy really talks like that and how it sounds saying typical normal things on a daily basis.
"Honey...coming this morning...Bacon! Eggs! Wheat Toast! Please."
"My dry cleaning, ready to be picked on Friday, April 1st!"
That would be so neat. Anyway, onto the John WOO!!!!! (You just gotta say his name like that) film.
The Ben part of Bennifer is Michael "Mike" Jennings and he's a super smart computer geek/engineer in what I thought was the future, but it really was just a year ahead of itself. He takes on jobs that are so super-duper important that he has his memory erased so he doesn't have any information about what he just did.
Mike gets an invite to a party from his friend with the threatening name...JIMMY! Jimmy asks Mike if he wants a job with him designing some top secret thing. The catch? It's gonna take three years of his life and those three years will be erased. Mike says yeah hell with it cause he's gonna get about a gazillion dollars for doing this.
Oh, and here are some things you need to remember during this movie. Mike knows kung-fu and fights with a wooden staff. In the "future" smoke alarms are everywhere. And Uma Thurman's character, Rachel Porter, can control the weather. Got all of that?
At the same party, Mike meets Rachel and botch's up his pick up line. He finds out the following day that she works for the evil Jimmy and is a biologist, which somehow means in this movie that she works with plants. Isn't that botny? Hmm...
Anyway, Mike goes in to work and while wondering around a lab is attacked by wind out of nowhere in a scene that looks like was explained in a edited out clip, and finds out its Rachel. Like I said, this is important later on. Mike goes to Jimmy's office and he gets a shot. The shot is an advanced way of erasing the memory. Before that, it was done on crummy futuristic computers while wearing a helmet. How primitive!!
So a big ass white light flashes across the screen and Mike wakes up in Jimmy's office, it's three years later, and Mike think's he getting all the money in the world. Well, he's wrong. When he goes to pick up the money, they hand him an envelope that contains 20 random things. I didn't write any of these things down, cause I wanted to test my memory. Here goes:
Bottle of hair spray.
A lighter.
A quarter.
A paperclip.
A crossword puzzle.
A big ass magnifying glass.
An allen wrench.
A bullet.
A fortune found in a fortune cookie with 7 numbers on them.
A bus pass.
A wedding ring.
A key to a BMW vechile.
A key to a storage closet.
The key pass to get into Jimmy's Building.
Some geeky looking glasses.
A pack of cigarettes.
A vile of round steel balls.
A watch.
And a matchbook.
Now you're probably counting the things and finding only 19, the 20th will be explained in a bit. But Mike is confused, expecting a shitload of money, and returns homes to yell at Jimmy. But some federal agents grab Mike and interrogate him.
They basically tell him Mike has been working on a device that could end all of humanity, but they don't allude to what it is exactly. But Mike says he doesn't remember and the fed's, believing him, try to get into his head by bring the memories back. While they're doing this, one of the agents decides to grab a smoke from the pack of cig's Mike had. The cigarette smoke causes the smoke detector to go off, and everything in the room shuts off. Mike sees this is his time to escape. But the room is cloudy, he can't see...AH!! The geek glasses!
He escapes and runs to a bus station, where he uses the bus pass to escape. While going through the evelope, he picks up the wedding ring, which some kid decides to steal. Mike chases him and he chases him to the bank he started out at.
This didn't make any sense cause what he finds out there is something he, and us the viewers, knew already. He finds out that he sent this crap to himself. DUH!!! This was established already! I guess this was in case you have A.D.D and forgot.
Anyway, in case you were wondering why I said Jimmy was evil, it turns out he framed Mike and thought the fed's were gonna kill him so Jimmy could rule the world...or something. It's kinda vague. But Jimmy finds out that Mike escaped, so he goes to have him killed.
Not knowing who else to turn to, Mike calls his best friend Shorty, played by Paul Giamatti. They meet at a train station (what's with the transportation stations? I'm surprised there wasn't an airport scene in this movie) and they discuss about the items when Mike catches the lotto numbers being drawn on TV. The winnings numbers match up to the numbers on the fortune. The point of this? Who the hell knows? I would've put the numbers on a lotto ticket, why the hell put the numbers on a fortune? Sheesh...
So at this point, you're probably wondering what's going on, what machine was built by Affleck, how he knows he's gonna need these things, and how in the world Ben Affleck could play a computer geek. To sum it all up, Mike invented a machine that looks into the future and shows you what's going to happen. And he looked into his future, saw all of this was going to happen and set up these little clues to help him along the way.
Well, Jimmy's henchmen show up and try to take down Mike. He gives Shorty the key to the storage close, which leads to an exit, and Paul Giamatti leaves the film forever. Mike escapes through the train tracks and the typical "Oh no a train is coming, I'm gonna die unless I do something" action movie scene takes place, but Mike tries to stop it by rewiring the train...with the paper clip! John Woo it works!
Mike goes back to his hotel room and finds out the matchbook cover is painted, so he washes it off and finds it's from a fancy cafe. He set up a reservation for two. Who's the other person? Hmmm....
UMA!!!
I just wanted to shout that, sorry if I scared you.
Mike left Rachel a secret message as well on the bathroom mirror telling her to meet him at the fancy cafe. But Jimmy, spying on Rachel in the bathroom (Eww, creepy), finds the clue and sends in a fake Rachel to trick Mike. Mike notices the fake Rachel and the real one knocks the fake one out with her purse.
Damn...those things are dangerous. They should be outlawed.
Jimmy's henchmen chase them when Mike realizes he left an automobile there, which is what the BMW key is for. But it's not for a car...
It's a motorcycle!! Escape in style I always say.
So the typical 15 minute scene of bad guys chasing the good guys through traffic and junkyards takes place here and of course the escape unharmed.
Back at a fancier hotel, thanks to Uma's "Kill Bill" check, Mike realizes he's married to her and thinks, "Wow, I'm one wicked 'smaat' dude." Then he realizes there was suppose to be 20 items...but there's 19...AH! The giant ass magnifiying glass shows that in the stamps is a tiny computer chip. And they put the chip under a microscope and find newspaper headlines from the future.
Nope, they're not the Jay Leno kind, they're sad and depressing, saying that Jimmy is gonna rule the world, and the president orders a war on Jimmy and nukes Los Angeles. That's kind of extreme, but I didn't make this movie. Plus the movie needs a plot so why not?
Mike realizes he needs to destroy the Future Machine (They don't give it a name in the movie, so that's my name. Like it? Yeah, me neither...), so they sneak back into the building, with the pass key, and go to destroy it.
While trying The Way Back Machine (Damn, that's been used..hmm..), he sees his future and sees he gets shot at and dies. Damn that sucks. So Mike goes to destroy it, and it's way too complicated to explain how the last few items are used, so just trust me in saying they are all used in some way, shape, or form and the machine gets blown up good, Mike doesn't die, he and Uma work at Short's greenhouse, and they all live happily ever after.
Phew!
Sorry for the cop out ending there, I really don't know how to explain the last 30 minutes of the movie, it's uber-complicated, and just gotta be seen for yourself.
Now, there are a SHITLOAD of plot holes and things that make you go, HUH?!?!, but overall, it's not a bad movie. It's an action flick where the bad guy's name is Jimmy, so don't expect too much. But it is dissapointing that this takes place 3 years from now, I thought it was done in like 2075 or something. Cause frankly, it would have to be that far in the future for computer geeks to look like Ben Affleck.
And I'm gonna end this by saying I think Paul Giamatti should've been the action guy in this movie, he moved pretty good. It sucks he gets the comic relief part, he should get a turn to slam a clip into the gun and say "Let's blow this bitch up!" and shoot 3,000 bad guys.
Damn it, let's get him in Die Hard 4!!
3 stars.
"Paycheck" on IMDb.com:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338337/