Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) is a reverse engineer. He takes pieces of intricate technology, figures out how they work, and rebuilds them from the ground up. Companies pay him highly for this skill, but they also require him to erase his memory of the time he was working for them. For his latest job, he commits to a three-year contract in return for a paycheck that would make him rich. But when he comes out of the contract, he finds that his reward consists of an nothing more than envelope full of cheap trinkets that he apparently mailed to himself a few weeks earlier–a time he no longer remembers. And the FBI are hunting him on suspicion of treason…

A worthy Philip K. Dick movie should be both playful and paranoid. Paycheck uses traditional Dickian themes of memory and identity to weave an exciting story about Jennings’ race to figure out why he sent himself that envelope, and what the objects inside mean. The overall plot may be predictable, but it is tremendous fun to watch all the little details slide neatly into place.