FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Field78 It is often said that movie studios have an employee who can summarize a screenplay in one sentence for the executives, so they have an idea of the story. It could not have been hard to do this with this movie: put The Firm, The Net and The Conversation in a blender, and you get Paranoia. Mixing a couple of old movies together can often lead to a refreshing new dish if you know which elements can make a good combination, and what to add yourself (it's what J.J. Abrams does all the time). However, here the writers have forgotten to give their movie a face of its own, and to make their screenplay leak-proof. The reason this film made it to the cinemas has undoubtedly got to do with all the big names in the cast, which makes you wonder how they got to say yes to this screenplay in the first place (although a big paycheck for a brief uncomplicated shoot probably goes a long way, and hauling in one A-lister often attracts the others as well). Clichés and predictability abound, from the debt-ridden young protagonist with a sick father (cigarettes, emphysema, cautionary tale) who gets access to the rich life and spontaneously forgets his friends, to the girl playing hard to get who becomes surprisingly docile after hearing one sad sob story. Then there are the evil henchman and the FBI agent who warns the protagonist with scary pictures of earlier victims, so in short, this movie is one big collections of tropes where you can even see the 'surprise twist' and the 'twist on top of the twist' coming from a mile away. Now some amount of predictability doesn't have to be an insurmountable problem if the story in itself is solid and intriguing, and if the cast is good. But the screenwriters didn't seem terribly preoccupied with things like logic and plausibility either. Are we supposed to believe that Liam Hemsworth just happens to have a one-night-stand with the girl who later becomes his target for industrial espionage? Any good screenwriter would have made sure that wasn't coincidence. Or that the solution to a problem would require some thinking rather than just presenting itself in a news bulletin. It gets really ridiculous when Hemsworth himself can apparently change super secret data that gives him access to a super secret vault with just a cellphone and a finger print. Or when the evil henchman thinks that he can get Hemsworth to climb into the plastic-lined trunk of his car inside a public garage with spectators all around. As said, the great cast seems wasted on this material, but they also provide the movie's sparse highlights. The confrontations between heavyweights Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford are satisfying, and it is pretty nice to see Oldman playing a British person in an American movie, and Ford without lots of hair for a change. Liam Hemsworth is adequate enough in the main role, but he is outshined by either Oldman or Ford as soon as they are in the room with him, let alone both (let's just say it is probably for the best that his brother Chris got to be Thor). But there are plenty of missed opportunities here too: Richard Dreyfuss plays the sick old dad, who gets nothing better to do than be sick and old. He could have been put to some good use, but his only role in the movie is to serve as motivation for his son. Josh Holloway (of Lost fame) gets way too little to do as the FBI man, and Embeth Davidtz is downright squandered in a role that could have been much more intriguing, especially since her character plays a brief but crucial part in the finale. I couldn't escape the feeling that some of her scenes may have been cut to get the running time below 2 hours.Director Robert Luketic is mostly known for his comedies with a romantic edge (Legally Blond, Killers) but he knows how to make a thriller look slick. That makes Paranoia at least watchable until the end, but it is really a shame that he didn't have a more solid screenplay. Although we can't disregard the possibility that some studio editing removed most of the character scenes that would have made great use of a stellar cast. A missed opportunity, but not a terribly boring one.

Nadine Salakov I've watched this flick more than once and i thought it would be just as enjoyable watching it again...i was wrong.The plot can seem confusing, but if you stick with the movie from beginning to end and concentrate on what is going on it makes sense and it becomes very intriguing, while watching this the verse comes to mind "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose your soul?", he has the nice posh apartment that they give him, but they're watching him via hidden cameras the whole time and they basically own him, this is not how a company is supposed to be, you're supposed to simply be an employer/employee and that's it, but this company is more than that - they're criminals, also the crap that he is saying at the start of the film about college and good grades not working in life anymore - shouldn't be taken seriously. This is not the type of cine that is fun to watch more than once.

kapelusznik18 ****SPOILERS****A bit boring as well as overly-complicated movie about corporate espionage that has young 27 year old inventor Adam "Hop-a-Long-Cassidy, Liam Hemsworth,get fired together with his crew from his job at Wyatt Corp. That's for him shooting his mouth off about just what a genius he is that enraged, in feeling he's the top banana,his boss Nicholas Wyyatt, Gary Oldman, who gave him his walking papers.The young fool Adam in trying to get back at his former boss uses the company credit card for him and his friends to party the night away without permission leaving him and friends open to credit fraud and as much as a 5 year jail sentence! Baqck home Adams has pressing problems with his widowed dad Frank, Richard Dreyfuss, who's already run up over $40,000.00 in medical bills, that his insurance doesn't cover, and is now hospitalized again with a near fatal heart-attack due to his refusal to stop smoking cheap as well as expensive cigars!It's during all this trouble that Adam is approached by one of Wyatt's goons to infiltrate his rival and once partner in business Jock Goddard, Harrison Ford, and find and give him the blueprint to his latest cellphone invention that's to revolutionized the world of electronics as well as make billions out of it. Getting in good with Jock or Jacko as he likes to be called Adam soon learns his secret invention but what he doesn't know about Jacko is that anyone who works for him under the table, like Adam, ends up mysteriously killed in a car accident or murdered in a mugging or home invasion.****SPOILERS****It takes a while for Adam to get the picture that he's being both blackmailed by Wyatt as Goddard for either getting killed or a long stretch, as a corporate spy, behind bars. His only chance to get out of this mess is work with the FBI in getting the goods on both corporate crooks by getting their conversations on his hidden cellphone that he does with the help of his unsuspecting girlfriend Emma Jennings, Amber Heard,who works in Goddard's office. Ridicules ending with a cool as a cucumber Adam putting the hurt on both Wyatt who by then already got royally screwed, by his cheating partner Goddard, as well as Goddard by having their plans exposed to the FBI with his hidden cellphone. As for Adam he got off light with a suspended sentence, like most snitches in these kind of movies, for cooperating with the FBI by getting a new start in life as well as a clean record in starting up his own electronic company with Emma not only married to him but being the company's vice president!!

brchthethird This movie proves that Liam Hemsworth isn't his brother, and doesn't have the charisma to be a leading man. Add to that a clichéd script driven by coincidence and stupidity, lazy performances and zero tension in what is ostensibly a "thriller" and you have yourself a turkey. To start, the voice-over narration is mostly pointless, as it's just telling you stuff that you're seeing, or will see in short time. There is minimal character development, and the lead character is so un-charismatic that it's painful to watch. He's not even that likable in my opinion. Sure, he has the puppy dog face, but he makes the stupidest decisions and he's an asshole to everyone he knows. The plot is something about corporate espionage, but we're never given a reason to care. There's lots of buzzwords and jargon thrown around to make it sound "hip" and "cool" or "techie" but none if it really adds up to anything. It just sounds like they didn't really think the story through that much. To top things off, what little conflict there is has no dramatic weight for the most part, and the ending wraps up everything too cleanly and quickly to be believable. Yay, good triumphs over evil, but throw reality out the window while you're at it. Even the romantic subplot isn't interesting enough to distract you from all of the ineptness in the movie, and to be honest they didn't have too much on screen chemistry anyway. The only legitimate reasons to see this movie are Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman, and even they ham it up in the scenes they're in, only appearing together twice. They can chew the scenery with the best of them, but they're given precious little to work with here. Still, there is some creative directorial flourishes (if you can call them that) which kind of lend a veneer of cool to the proceedings, but everything else is so banal it really begs the question why the director even bothered with a script this bad. Save your money and/or time with this one.