As a general rule, I tend to avoid these kinds of white-male-produced-directed-cast thriller and action films because they're almost always nothing more than cliché-driven superficial and disposable time-wastes that exemplify most of the things that are wrong with the Hollywood film industry. Given that Paranoia very obviously fits this mold, one could rightly wonder why I sacrificed (grudgingly so, if I may add) 106 minutes of my life watching it. The answer is simple: Amber Heard. I watched this film purely because Amber Heard was cast in it and, as an enthusiast of her films who got it in me to go through her entire filmography, I had to watch it.
The movie is a corporate espionage thriller in which a supposedly ordinary worker (Adam Cassidy, played by Liam Hemsworth) for a high-end tech company is used by his boss (Nicolas Wyatt, played by Gary Oldman) to attempt to steal proprietary information from a rival company headed by a former business partner of the boss. Other than a couple of quite predictable twists in the end, this pretty much sums up what the movie is about. As such, the movie's shallow plot, which rides on little but overused cliché's in its genre, is one of its major drawbacks. Another one is its seeming overreliance on the popularity of its cast members to, perhaps, try to remedy this shortcoming.
Even more problems are apparent in the movie's glaring and rather off-putting lack of racial and gender diversity. I mean, come on, 2013 is not so long ago as to "justify" the male "whiteness" of the movie's crew and cast members. This shouldn't be surprising though given that director Robert Luketic has previously been criticized for engaging in this kind of prejudicial casting at least in his 2008 heist drama film 21. In addition, this movie's script suffers from a related problem, which is that while the writers (all white men) seem to pretend to convey a message about the ills of capitalism and corporate greed in which those in power exploit those without it, they nevertheless affirm and try to justify the hegemony of white men over everybody else in the corporate world. I mean, are we to believe that the remedy to the exploitation that Adam suffers at the hands of his old white male employers is, as the movie concludes, just a younger version of these employers? In the end, while the writers pay lip service to happiness and contentment being attainable in the simple life that Adam's father (Richard Dreyfuss) led, they, quite inconsistently and inexplicably, end the movie with Adam still aspiring to living the very life that his crooked bosses led and that was the source of his misery throughout the movie.
Besides these problems with the movie's plot, narrative, and casting choices, its visuals, audio, and acting were largely ordinary and not really outstanding. That is, excepting the performances of Liam Hemsworth and Amber Heard (as Emma Jennings), which were magnificent and just about the only genuinely positive aspects of the movie.
Focusing on Heard, her casting as Emma was a bit unusual, albeit understandable within the trajectory of her career. It was unusual because most of Heard's past major roles before this movie were characters that were more in control of their narrative arcs (i.e. More "agentic") than Emma is. For instance, in Syrup - which is also a corporate drama movie that was released in 2013 - Heard plays Six, a woman that is central to the movie's plot and that stands in opposition to the main male character, Scat. In contrast, Luketic and his writers make Emma to be little more than Adam's muse, puppet, and instrument. Considering that Heard is the leading supporting actress in this movie which means that all other women characters play less prominent roles, Emma's lack of much agency in it is a testament to just how sexist against women the movie's writing and plot is. Nevertheless, Heard can hardly be blamed for having accepted to feature in the movie in such a role because the movie was arguably a landmark for Heard's career as, it seems to me, it was the first time that she played such a prominent supporting role in a major Hollywood thriller alongside as many A list actors as were cast in it.
Still, despite the fact that Emma was written so poorly and so scantily, Heard still manages to play her so convincingly and with such flare that I was hopelessly dependent on her scenes to get me through the grand cliché that the rest of the movie largely was. Indeed, anyone that's seen Heard's previous movies would agree that the confidence and authenticity that she channels into Emma in this movie can only be matched by those that she channels into Six in Syrup, Piper in Drive Angry, and Nikki in ExTerminators. One can only thus lament about the fact that Luketic and his writers' sexism robbed them of the opportunity to broaden Emma's role in the narrative in order to make the most out of Heard's performance of her. If only they'd taken some notes from Aram Rappaport's Syrup.
All in all, Amber Heard (and, to some extent, Liam Hemsworth) are just about the two positive things about this movie amidst an ocean of negatives. As such, all things considered, I was going to give this movie 4 stars but decided on 7 purely because of Heard's (2 stars) and Hemsworth's (1 star) acting. I recommend the movie mostly to fans of Heard and Hemsworth but it could also be enjoyable to many other people as a fun but forgettable past-time that could, if given a generous reading, even be educational and thought-provoking.
The movie is a corporate espionage thriller in which a supposedly ordinary worker (Adam Cassidy, played by Liam Hemsworth) for a high-end tech company is used by his boss (Nicolas Wyatt, played by Gary Oldman) to attempt to steal proprietary information from a rival company headed by a former business partner of the boss. Other than a couple of quite predictable twists in the end, this pretty much sums up what the movie is about. As such, the movie's shallow plot, which rides on little but overused cliché's in its genre, is one of its major drawbacks. Another one is its seeming overreliance on the popularity of its cast members to, perhaps, try to remedy this shortcoming.
Even more problems are apparent in the movie's glaring and rather off-putting lack of racial and gender diversity. I mean, come on, 2013 is not so long ago as to "justify" the male "whiteness" of the movie's crew and cast members. This shouldn't be surprising though given that director Robert Luketic has previously been criticized for engaging in this kind of prejudicial casting at least in his 2008 heist drama film 21. In addition, this movie's script suffers from a related problem, which is that while the writers (all white men) seem to pretend to convey a message about the ills of capitalism and corporate greed in which those in power exploit those without it, they nevertheless affirm and try to justify the hegemony of white men over everybody else in the corporate world. I mean, are we to believe that the remedy to the exploitation that Adam suffers at the hands of his old white male employers is, as the movie concludes, just a younger version of these employers? In the end, while the writers pay lip service to happiness and contentment being attainable in the simple life that Adam's father (Richard Dreyfuss) led, they, quite inconsistently and inexplicably, end the movie with Adam still aspiring to living the very life that his crooked bosses led and that was the source of his misery throughout the movie.
Besides these problems with the movie's plot, narrative, and casting choices, its visuals, audio, and acting were largely ordinary and not really outstanding. That is, excepting the performances of Liam Hemsworth and Amber Heard (as Emma Jennings), which were magnificent and just about the only genuinely positive aspects of the movie.
Focusing on Heard, her casting as Emma was a bit unusual, albeit understandable within the trajectory of her career. It was unusual because most of Heard's past major roles before this movie were characters that were more in control of their narrative arcs (i.e. More "agentic") than Emma is. For instance, in Syrup - which is also a corporate drama movie that was released in 2013 - Heard plays Six, a woman that is central to the movie's plot and that stands in opposition to the main male character, Scat. In contrast, Luketic and his writers make Emma to be little more than Adam's muse, puppet, and instrument. Considering that Heard is the leading supporting actress in this movie which means that all other women characters play less prominent roles, Emma's lack of much agency in it is a testament to just how sexist against women the movie's writing and plot is. Nevertheless, Heard can hardly be blamed for having accepted to feature in the movie in such a role because the movie was arguably a landmark for Heard's career as, it seems to me, it was the first time that she played such a prominent supporting role in a major Hollywood thriller alongside as many A list actors as were cast in it.
Still, despite the fact that Emma was written so poorly and so scantily, Heard still manages to play her so convincingly and with such flare that I was hopelessly dependent on her scenes to get me through the grand cliché that the rest of the movie largely was. Indeed, anyone that's seen Heard's previous movies would agree that the confidence and authenticity that she channels into Emma in this movie can only be matched by those that she channels into Six in Syrup, Piper in Drive Angry, and Nikki in ExTerminators. One can only thus lament about the fact that Luketic and his writers' sexism robbed them of the opportunity to broaden Emma's role in the narrative in order to make the most out of Heard's performance of her. If only they'd taken some notes from Aram Rappaport's Syrup.
All in all, Amber Heard (and, to some extent, Liam Hemsworth) are just about the two positive things about this movie amidst an ocean of negatives. As such, all things considered, I was going to give this movie 4 stars but decided on 7 purely because of Heard's (2 stars) and Hemsworth's (1 star) acting. I recommend the movie mostly to fans of Heard and Hemsworth but it could also be enjoyable to many other people as a fun but forgettable past-time that could, if given a generous reading, even be educational and thought-provoking.