Paranoia - Riskantes Spiel

"The lights always look brighter across the river." After saying the wrong things, Adam (Hemsworth) an up-and-coming employee at a powerful corporation finds himself and his friends out of a job. After the owner Nicolas Wyatt (Oldman) recruits him to spy on rival Jock Goddard (Ford) to find out what his company is coming up with Adam finds himself stuck in the middle of a dangerous game. When he wants out he realizes that it's not just his life is threatened unless he completes his task. I was looking forward to watching this for two reasons. Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman, also Richard Dreyfuss is in this but in a lesser role. I cannot recall a movie they have been in that has been bad (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was bad but its still Indiana Jones so I can't hate it and I blame Lucas for that anyway). I did find out how to mess up a movie with those two legendary actors...add baby Thor (Liam Hemsworth). I'm not saying he was a bad actor in this because it wasn't terrible but when you have those two in a movie and you make baby Thor the main focus you have screwed up somewhere. I'd compare this to the movie Son Of No One in the way that you have Ray Liotta and Al Pacino and you make Channing Tatum the focus. Nothing personal against Hemsworth or Tatum but when you have such high caliber actors why waste them? As far as this movie goes the scenes with Oldman and Ford are amazing as expected, as far as the rest goes it was slow, a little boring and not exciting at all. With the plot being about the seedy underworld of the cellphone app industry though you don't have much to work with. Overall, a movie that could have been so much better but ended up being almost not worth seeing. It pains me to do this but I give it a C.

This movie is not gripping {Inception}. This movie will not keep you guessing {Now You See Me}. This movie is not Oldman/Ford material and why they took the job is beyond me. If you are 25 or younger it's a great date movie (because there's time to make out as the film drags in several spots). It doesn't twist and turn and the revelations are minimal and far from making the audience gasp. Four out of ten stars may be generous. Good-looking stars and block-busting legends does not a good movie make; much less a great movie. Though I would like to get hold of that ring-tone. Character development was sloppy and dialog was quite pedantic.

Thankfully, Gary Oldman can make almost any film bearable and his portrayal here of a ruthless, corrupt CEO is just about the only thing that this derivative movie has going for it. He manages to infuse a one-dimensional character with at least one more dimension.

The script is so full of hackneyed clichés that I felt like I was watching a Dan Brown novel. You have to assume that the writer's entire experience of the corporate world is based on a combination of Occupy Movement manifestos and Oliver Stone movies. Liam Hemsworth has evidently starred in something call the Hunger Games where, I have to assume, he was hired for his looks and not his acting chops.

August is usually the doldrums when it comes to movie releases and this dud simply proves the rule to which Blue Jasmine is the exception.

Cassidy and his friends work for Wyatt mobile and are pitching a new idea to the boss. He doesn't care for it and Cassidy gets arrogant. They're fired but for some reason he still has an active expense account credit card and they party that night. He also meets the pretty Emma.

The next day, Wyatt wants to meet with Cassidy. He will get him a job with his childhood competitor Goddard so that he can steal Goddard's next big idea. He's got a behavioral specialist on board and sets Cassidy up with the good life and trains him. Cassidy gets the job and Goddard is impressed with his idea. And as it turns out Emma also works for Goddard. Everything is going fine until Wyatt's people become more pushy and want him to steal the future device from Goddard's corporate vault. Of course he's caught and with that Goddard wants to buy Wyatt's company or put him in jail, but Cassidy has some plans of his own.

Paranoia has a lot going for a it- a decent budget, impressive cast, an OK story, good visuals. It even starts with some important discussion about how America has completely ceased being the country of opportunity it once was. The direction is poor and the script could have used some work. The movie's title is wrong or if they intended to highlight the moment of Cassidy's paranoia they failed. As a whole, emotionally, this movie is pretty flat. There should be a far greater sense of dread and danger. Perhaps it's because they went with a PG-13 rating. As an R-rated movie this could have been better. I get the sense that they aimed for a mature teen audience looking for a serious movie. And perhaps it would work for that crowd- not sure. Paranoia had a lot of potential. I wanted to like this movie as the cast does a good job, except for Oldman's and Davidtz's obnoxious British accent. But the director did his best and succeeded at frustrating the audience and not giving us as good a movie as it should have been.

A thriller about the dark world of tech business giants, with big shot start like Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford, what could go wrong, right? Well, with this movie, almost everything did. It's slow, boring, repetitive and overall just disappointing.

Adam (Liam Hensworth) is a programmer (I think, because character development apparently wasn't a priority in this movie) who gets stuck in the middle of a feud between two tech giants, Wyatt and Goddard, played by Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford. And that's about as deep as the story goes. There's some background as to the rivalry between Wyatt and Goddard and a hard-to-believe love story between Adam and one of Goddard's executives, but overall, the film feels like an unfinished job, with a lot of potential, but no real charm to it.

I've got to accept the movie has some good things worth mentioning. Gary Oldman is great, as expected, in his limited screen time, and the final scenes are actually pretty good, but all in all this was not a good movie, and I would not recommend it.