#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.Now if you will excuse me, I am off the register the title "Lee Daniels' Paranoia" just to be on the safe side, an experience sure to be more gripping than anything to be found here. The sad thing about it is that it takes a perfectly nifty title-the kind that might have found a proper home in the filmography of the likes of Brian De Palma or Dario Argento-and absolutely squanders it on a project undeserving of it while ensuring that no one else will be able to make proper use of it for a long time unless they make a clever adjustment or two. As for their veteran counterparts, they, lacking anything compelling to work with, fall back to their respective default modes of late-Oldman chews the scenery with the kind of over-scaled hamminess that pays fewer dividends this time around than usual while Ford tries his best to fade into the woodwork, no doubt embarrassed over having somehow managed to find a technology-based project to appear in that is even more idiotic than the long-forgotten " Firewall."Īlthough presumably meant to be a modern-day version of the classic conspiracy thriller " The Conversation," "Paranoia" is so vapid that it plays like " Antitrust" sans the food allergies. Hemsworth and Heard are both impossibly attractive but generate zero sparks between them, though they are admittedly hampered by a screenplay in which the unvarnished techno-jargon they exchange in one scene is the closest that it ever gets to convincing flirtatious banter. Sadly, the rest of the film is so draggy that I kept wanting to pick up and see if there was something more interesting on the other end. For his part, Luketic tries to mask the narrative shortcomings with a lazily flashy visual style and a staggeringly irritating score that uses cell phone sounds as a recurring motif.
The story is implausible in ways both big (why would Wyatt entrust this top-secret plan to a self-centered hothead like Adam?) and small (unless the film is set in a world in which "A View to a Kill" really happened, why are all the big tech firms suddenly located in mid-town Manhattan?) and asks viewers to care about one selfish jerk trying to worm his way out of being the pawn of two other selfish jerks. Then again, not even the likes of Hitchcock himself could have done much with the material supplied here by screenwriters Jason Dean Hall and Barry Levy, working from the novel by Joseph Finder. Some might argue that this is what you get when you put potentially suspenseful material in the hands of a filmmaker like Robert Luketic, a director whose oeuvre includes " Legally Blonde," "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" and two lesser Katherine Heigl vehicles (" The Ugly Truth" and "Killers"). You will notice that I did not mention "paranoia" in that web and that is because this is one of the least paranoid paranoid thrillers that you will ever experience.
Judith Bolton ( Embeth Davidtz) and the muscle provided by Wyatt's chief goon ( Julian McMahon), Adam worms his way into the company and Goddard's good graces-not to mention Emma, who just happens to work there as well-and everything seems to be going swimmingly, but once the FBI begins sniffing around, it gradually begins to dawn on him that he is now caught in a web of lies and deceit and must use his wits to play his oppressors off of each other in an effort to survive. With the aid of a "Pygmalion"-style grooming overseen by Dr. The next day, Adam is called back before Wyatt but instead of having him arrested or pulped, his former boss makes him an offer that he cannot refuse-be groomed into the perfect candidate for a top-level job at the rival tech firm run by Wyatt's one-time mentor and current rival Jack Goddard (Ford) and use his access to purloin the details of a top-secret project. Although it has been previously established that WyattCorp is ruthless and greedy enough to reduce Adam's company insurance at just the precise moment that his sickly dad ( Richard Dreyfuss) lands in the hospital, they inexplicably leave the group's corporate credit card up and running long enough for him to lead the gang out for an insanely expensive night on the town and himself into the bed of comely go-getter Emma Jennings ( Amber Heard). One day, Adam goes before the boss with his development team for a pitch meeting and whiffs things so spectacularly that he gets the entire group terminated right then and there. Our hero, for lack of a more accurate or printable term, is Adam Cassidy ( Liam Hemsworth), a poor-but-hunky low-level employee of WyattCorp, a multinational tech firm run by the all-powerful Nicolas Wyatt (Oldman).
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