I didn’t know a lot about Paranoia before viewing it. Outside of the trailer, it didn’t have any advertising from what I could tell.
But it did have two great actors in head roles, so there is some amount of hope that it is surprisingly decent.
Hey. That guy looks like a thinner, less strong, less manly, Thor. How weird.
The story centers on Adam (Liam Hemsworth), who works for a big phone company lead by Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman). Adam is leading a small team to help develop a tool for their new phone model, but Wyatt ignores him, causing Adam to lose his temper. Needless to say, Wyatt does not choose their project and fires the whole team.
Adam, despite being in debt with his sick dad (Richard Dreyfuss), decides to use the company expense card to live it up with his former coworkers in a moment of mutiny.
Well, now Wyatt has him on credit fraud. Adam doesn’t want to go to prison, so he will do anything Wyatt asks of him. Even if it means stealing.
Wyatt and his associate Judith (Embeth Davidtz) hook Adam up with a fancy new wardrobe, apartment, and personality, so he can get a job as an executive for Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), who happens to run the biggest phone company. They are working on a sleek new phone that is said to revolutionize the world, and Wyatt wants a prototype. If he succeeds, he will get his friends (mostly Lucas Till) their jobs back, have money for his dad, and will have job security for the rest of his life.
We also have Amber Heard as a marketing direct and main love interest forAdam, Julian McMahon as a lackie of Wyatt, and Josh Holloway as an FBI detective.
These two are juggernauts in the acting world. I have now used ‘juggernaut’ in a review.
If you watch the trailer, you really don’t have to see the movie. They tell you the entire main plot while also spoiling the main twists as well! Seriously, something is given away in the trailer that doesn’t happen until the final twenty minutes, a major plot point.
Unfortunately, the plot itself is predictable (even without the trailer). Having a predictable plot is bad if you are trying to make a crime/thriller. The acting is also not really anything special. The side plot with the friends who lost their job is nothing more than cringe worthy and a distraction.
But the so-so acting and bad plot are not the worse parts. The worse part comes from the tiny details they did not care about.
These two men are the heads of the two biggest mobile phone makers in the world/country. They have their own unique names and everything. Yet they and their heads of staff are using iPhones. I might have seen a Galaxy S3 in there as well. That is just pure laziness. I wouldn’t have noticed if they didn’t constantly show the phones up close.
It almost seems like they are taunting the viewer. They are taunting us by showing how little they cared about the final product of this movie and it showed.