‘Paranoia’: An Undercooked Espionage Caper

Adam Cassidy wants more from life.

Born in Brooklyn and raised by his cigar-smoking father Frank (Richard Dreyfuss), who worked a steady job until retirement, Adam (Liam Hemsworth) wants to completely abandon his upbringing and bathe in excess – drive the extravagant cars, date the dashing women, and sport the opulent clothing. I know this is what Adam (a 20-something technological savant) desires because Paranoia is laced with stupefying voice-over narration that spells out every motive and proclivity its characters have.

Director Robert Luketic (responsible for The Killers and The Ugly Truth) essentially welcomes you to head to the bathroom, check your Twitter account, watch some paint dry, or doze off. Do anything but pay attention to what’s on the screen. Conveniently enough, by the time you awake you’ll be provided with some half-baked voice-over work explaining everything you’ve missed, and then some.

Luketic’s utter disregard for the intelligence of his audience is exacerbated by a dopey plot. In order to get ahead in the cutthroat world of selling cellular phones, Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) gets Adam a job at a rival company run by his mentor, Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), who has plans to release a device called “The Cure.” Adam’s mission? To befriend Goddard, garner trust within the company, and procure the game-changing apparatus for Wyatt.

In debt to the malevolent Wyatt (who is also threatening to dispose of Frank), Adam has no choice but to fulfill his demands. Espionage does come with its perks, though. To look the part, all of Adam’s bodacious wet dreams come true: the ornate sports car, the gorgeous woman (played by a terribly underwritten Amber Heard), and the palatial skyline apartment.

As Paranoia dawdles forward, the dramatic irony of Adam playing the Trojan horse with ostensibly innocuous intentions grows more and more tiring. Godard is duped so easily by Adam’s façade that it’s obvious something is missing. And that’s the general feeling I had throughout Paranoia: Something is absent from this caper.

Perhaps it’s the lack of adhesive to glue all the pieces of this espionage puzzle together. Luketic’s eulogies on the digitized, anti-privacy milieu we inhabit are rote and uncreative. The film’s themes are muddled, unfocused, and scattershot. And whether it’s claiming there’s no such thing as morality in the ruthless business world or lamenting how the American dream has been obliterated by white-collar crooks, Paranoia doesn’t take the time to delve into any of the many issues it raises.

Aside from the film’s assault on the technological advances made in the 21st century (the tagline for the his movie is “Privacy is a myth”), Paranoia quickly dissolves into a chess match between two old friends-turned-foes (with two great actors turning in admirable performances) that get dumber with each passing scene.

The film’s finale is almost as unremarkable as Hemsworth one-dimensional performance as a two-faced character, catching up with the characters’ stupidity in a haphazardly-designed, mostly tensionless climax. Ultimately, the joke is on us (as Eric D. Snider comically noted) for believing Paranoia was a real movie that actually existed on planet Earth.

I’m still hoping it’s not.

Grade: D+