Friday, August 16, 2013
By Connie Ogle
The Miami Herald
“I wanted more,” says ambitious young Adam Cassidy at the start of the thriller “Paranoia.”
Adam is explaining via voiceover how he got caught in a web of deceit, but watching this movie, I know how he feels. Based on the novel by Joseph Finder, “Paranoia” has a promising foundation — betrayal, danger and corporate espionage are solid building blocks of suspense. But the movie turns out to be more exasperating than exciting.
There is too much here that doesn’t ring true or make any sense beyond script convenience.
Liam Hemsworth (“The Hunger Games”) plays Adam, who lives with his ailing father (Richard Dreyfuss) in Brooklyn. Adam toils in obscurity at a tech company with his friends and can’t get in the high-end clubs.
But Adam, as he has mentioned, wants more. He has plans to wow his CEO Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) by making “the pitch of his life” about cellphone technology. Things go badly — ostensibly not because he’s wearing a hoodie at the most important meeting of his life, but you have to wonder — and everybody gets fired. In a moment of pure idiocy, Adam encourages his friends to drink all night on Wyatt’s dime and finds himself summoned to the office the next day.
But his crafty boss, borrowing Michael Caine’s accent for the duration of the film, doesn’t want his money back. He blackmails Adam into going undercover at a rival tech firm run by his old mentor (Harrison Ford) to steal a prototype for a revolutionary new product.
The plot takes a few nice twists, but would anyone genuinely believe doe-eyed Adam could pull off this heist in a security-obsessed building? Even though he’s bedding the company’s marketing director (Amber Heard) and sneaking access to her computer files? Fortunately, she’s careless with her passwords, which is exactly the sort of cheap shortcut “Paranoia’s” script relies on one too many times.