It’s time for a film with a pretty interesting premise, in part because I could see this actually happening in real life at some point. Companies want to keep things confidential after all and right now people sign non-disclosure agreements but at the end of the day those are hardly full proof. What if they could just erase your memories? Oh man that would be a company’s ultimate dream! This movie is pretty fun and will keep you entertained the whole time but I do have to admit that the main character does come across as gullible.

The film starts off by introducing us to Michael who basically contracts with various companies to work on specialized projects. After which his memories are deleted and he goes off to live his life. The positive here of course is that he’s making absolute bank. The guy is basically rich because of the missions but the negative of course is that he’s missing massive parts of his life. He’s completely okay with this and feels that it’s a fair trade off though. Well, one day an old friend shows up and asks him if he is interested in a longer term contract. This one will last 3 years and of course he won’t remember any of it. Michael agrees but when he wakes up, it turns out that he gave away all of his money for some reason and all of the records have been destroyed. Now he is being hunted and it’s all an elaborate frame up. What can he do to get out of this?

I have to give the film more credit here because this is exactly what my worst fear would be. When you’re erasing whole chunks of your memory like that, you seriously have no idea what happened previously and that is opening up the door to all kinds of trouble. You can’t properly defend yourself from someone accusing you of something when you yourself don’t know what occurred right? So long story short, I would never even consider doing this even if the money was really good like this. An added wrinkle is in this film the procedure of removing memories is actually super dangerous as well so one wrong move and you will lose all of your memories or potentially even die in the machine.

Michael is one of those guys who usually takes things in stride. He’s fairly confident in himself and is skilled but as a character I wouldn’t say that he’s great. He’s cool with having one night stands since he figures that he will forget all about them afterwards anyway and that doesn’t make for a particularly solid romance. So once he does fall for someone you have a hard time buying into it. The romance doesn’t seem all that convincing and in large part it’s because the main character doesn’t exactly seem like a great guy.

You still feel bad for him of course since being framed is rough but that’s about it. As the main heroine Rachel isn’t bad. Taking aside the romance plot of it all, she does contribute a lot to the plot and can also be rather tough which I always like to see in the heroine. Michael also has a friend in Shorty who is very helpful here. The guy has a bit of an “I told you so” attitude but it is completely justified he whole time. Like this was a bad idea from the jump and it was pretty clear to see.

Now where the film taps into some interesting themes is with how Michael keeps having items on hand that are useful in very specific circumstances at specific moments. It’s basically as if he is following a destiny that is pre written by his past self who saw into the future. I always like theory crafting with time and looking at all of the different ways it could work. Basically, if you can see into the future then does that imply that your future is written in stone, you are just seeing one possible version?, or was that the future but the instant you saw it, it has now changed since you can effect things?

Personally I always go with the one possible version theory because to me it makes the most sense by far. You should be able to change the future once you have seen it and everything being pre written is just hard to buy for me. That said, this one is mainly going in that direction as Michael saw the future and planned things out extremely carefully in a self fulfilling cycle where he saw what was going to happen and made sure that it did. So what happens when two people see the future? Well that’s another interesting one.

The climax is pretty fun as it deals with all of that. On the whole I wouldn’t say the film is super action packed or anything like that but there are a whole lot of chase scenes. We also get the government involved which is always fun. Of course they do tend to get in the way a lot at first as they take everything at face value and fall for the villain’s traps. The fact that they went straight to torturing the lead and nearly frying his brain was a really bad look for them. Come on now can’t they at least pretend to not act like the villains for a little while?

Overall, Paycheck is a pretty fun. On its surface it’s just a classic action thriller but the time manipulation and sci-fi elements help to make it stand out. It has some interesting themes there and while that’s never the focus, it is still a fun little thing to touch on even if it’s just temporary. I’d recommend checking this film out, it’s a solid cautionary tale about how technology can get really dangerous really quickly if you rely on it too much. At the end of the day I personally recommend not letting anyone mess with your memories, but hey that’s just me. Also important to note that even if you don’t remember something, it still happened. So Michael’s idea here about doing stuff since he won’t remember it later on…yeah not a very good idea.

Overall 7/10