“Reverse engineering” — taking a final product and determining how it works — is a valuable capability, and Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) is the best in the business. Jennings can, for instance, reverse one company’s new three-dimensional computer monitor for another company. But Jennings is not just a painstaking and competent hack — he can put some of his own creativity into his final product (e.g., devising a new three-dimensional monitor that doesn’t really require the monitor, a la Princess Leia’s message to Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars). Jennings is paid highly for his “consulting work”, but he is also usually required to undergo a brainscrub to prevent him from remembering, and so from revealing, the work he has done to potential competitors.

At a party, where he meets delightful biologist Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman), Jennings is hired by the host, his friend James Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart), to do some undisclosed work for Rethrick’s company AllCom (for which, by coincidence, Porter also works). The work won’t require just the usual couple of months but will take three years, though the payment will be on the order of 80 to 100 million dollars. Jennings shows up at the company for work, takes a shot from security chief Wolfe (Colm Feore) to set up the conditions for the eventual brainscrub, goes to look over the company “campus” — and suddenly finds himself back in Rethrick’s office, the three years up and himself on his way out.

Yet when he arrives at his brokerage firm to process his money, he finds that he has none; some weeks earlier he resigned the rights to the money and simply sent himself an envelope, postage overpaid, presumably containing the few private effects that he had to turn in when he went to work for the company. And even there he finds problems; the items in the envelope are ones that he has never seen before, and seem to have very little use (a paper clip, a small plastic cylinder containing six ball bearings, a quarter, a package of cigarettes, a diamond ring — possibly zircon — and others). Yet within a few minutes the items in the envelope are helping him escape from the FBI, which wants him to tell what he did for AllCom (the cigarettes trigger a fire suppressant system in the FBI offices, the glasses in the envelope help Jennings get out through the resulting mist, a transit ticket in the envelope gets him into a transit depot and onto an outbound bus …). The rest of the film consists of Jennings’ attempts to figure out what is going on, how to make use of the items in the envelope, and how to escape from both the FBI and Wolfe’s and Rethrick’s AllCom goons, partly with the help of Porter, with whom he has lived for three years but whom he doesn’t know from Eve. ⁽¹⁾

An interesting, fast-moving (it was made by John Woo), action-filled film. I’m glad I finally went to see it.

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⁽¹⁾ The one major flaw in the film. Jennings is represented, after the three years, as not remembering Porter at all — but he met her at the party before he went to work for AllCom, hence before the period of his memory scrub, and she made quite an impression — he should at least have remembered her from that. Don Harlow, January 24, 2004 09:00 PM

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