I honestly hadn’t heard much of anything about Paranoia until a week or so ago. It’s a crowded summer movie season, so it’s no surprise that a corporate espionage thriller like Paranoia has been overshadowed by blockbusters. However, after seeing it, it’s clear why Relativity Media decided to bury it in August behind much flashier movies: it’s as generic as its own poster.
Adam (Liam Hemsworth) is a tech guru who works at Wyatt, one of the leading cell phone companies. He is just managing to keep himself and his ailing father (Richard Dreyfuss) above water in the Brooklyn row house they share. However, his father’s costly medical bills become a major problem when Wyatt cuts off his insurance (something Adam was apparently unaware about) and he then even loses his job after an awful product pitch to the company’s cutthroat founder Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman), who is desperate to find out a way to take down his rival and former mentor, Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford).
Though he fired Adam, Wyatt recognizes potential in the young man and blackmails him into a scheme to find out Goddard’s rumored “game changing” next product. Wyatt’s plan? Turn Adam into a model Goddard employee, sneak him into an executive job with Goddard’s company, and earn Goddard’s trust by pitching him a billion-dollar idea. Of course, Wyatt could’ve kept probably put a huge dent in Goddard’s business by just implementing that billion dollar idea for his own company, but let’s just go with this. Anyway, Adam’s “training” to become an ideal Goddard employee takes place over a weekend and involves Hemsworth being shirtless a lot since becoming an expert executive apparently requires lots of swimming and showering. Then within what seems to be a handful of days Adam becomes a top executive at Goddard’s company and is romancing Emma (Amber Heard), an (also) impossibly young marketing executive. Oh yeah, the plan involves getting into her pants because, well, it does. I guess that’s what all the shirtless training was about.
As you can guess, everything soon spins out of Adam’s control. This has already been done before in much better movies you’ve seen, like Wall Street. Like most movies about modern technology, the dialogue of Paranoia is filled with meaningless jargon with a few buzzwords like “social networking” and “smart phone” thrown in to reassure the audience that they’re smart enough to follow the silliness that’s going on. The shots of New York City are likewise typical, as is the pounding soundtrack… heck, there’s probably a movie JUST like this waiting in your NetFlix queue.
Hemsworth is a likable actor, but he’s not a leading man (at least not yet). It’s painfully obvious that he’s completely miscast — there’s a reason why audiences can buy someone like Jesse Eisenberg as a tech wiz. For all its faults, at least The Internship cast people who actually looked and acted what one would expect tech geniuses to be like, because every single one of them in this movie looks like an Ambercrombie model. In fact, Lucas Till, who plays Adam’s best friend Kevin, would have been a much better choice for the lead, though a studio probably would have never gone for it. This even makes sense within the context of the movie, because Kevin seems to be the brains behind all of Adam’s big ideas.
While I obviously don’t expect all lead characters to be “likable,” Hemsworth’s Adam really pushing the boundaries of tolerance. I mean, he goes to great lengths to sell out his friends and girlfriend for ridiculous amounts of money. Sure, the filmmakers hooked Dreyfuss up to an oxygen tank and gave him huge medical bills to try to get the audience on Adam’s side, but he’s still a dumb, vanity-obsessed kid. Frankly, that’s the only thing believable about his character. From the moment Adam and his friends show up to the major pitch meeting dressed like hipster doofuses (doofusi?) it’s obvious that for all the jargon-filled dialogue we’re watching a movie about some very stupid characters (later, when Kevin shows up for an interview at Goddard’s company it’s clear he has still never discovered what a “suit” is).
The two reasons to see Paranoia are to see Ford and Oldman in a film together again (they were both in Air Force One) and Dreyfuss and Ford in a film together again (who haven’t been in a film together since American Graffiti forty years ago). However, Ford and Dreyfuss share no scenes (come to think of it, they really didn’t in American Graffiti either). And naturally, the only two scenes that feature both Ford and Oldman are the most riveting in the movie. The problem of using actors like Ford, Oldman, and Dreyfuss in a movie like this as supporting characters is that they’re far more compelling than Hemsworth or Heard.
Director Robert Luketic crosses similar territory that he did with 21, but he’s also made bad romantic “comedy” movies like Killers and Monster-in-Law. That sort of sensibility rears its ugly head during the “romantic” scenes between Hemsworth and Heard. Meanwhile, writers Jason Dean Hall (Spread) and Barry Levy (Vantage Point) haven’t found a way to make this story work as a film. Paranoia might have been a bestselling book, but this isn’t a cinematic story.
Which leaves me with one last question — how exactly did such an average movie with a $15 million budget end up with such a good supporting cast?
Rating: Despite the great supporting cast, you’ve seen much better movies with the same premise (3.5/10).
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