The tagline for Paranoia reads: “In a war between kings, even a pawn can change the game.” Unfortunately, this is far too true. In the case of this film, the pawn does change the game – for the worse. The pawn is, of course, Liam Hemsworth. Hemsworth plays the role of the overly ambitious Adam Cassidy, who will do whatever it takes to get ahead. You know, the same stuff you’ve seen in the trailers for this one. However, what the trailers don’t show, is how poor of an actor Hemsworth really is.
Now, it wouldn’t be fair to place all of the blame on Hemsworth alone. His co-star and love interest, Amber Heard, is also quite the letdown. To be honest, I could have cared less about what was happening with these characters. Specifically, the love connection between Adam and Emma just wasn’t very captivating. Really, there really wasn’t much of anything that Hemsworth or Heard did to keep me interested throughout. Their stories felt super cliché. And again, the poor acting from both of them certainly didn’t help their cause.
That’s not to say that the rest of the story wasn’t at least intriguing. Truth be told, the idea behind Paranoia was pretty cool. Overall, I think it was poorly executed, but interesting nonetheless. Without going into too much detail, the two “kings” mentioned above are Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) and Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), and they are clashing with one another in an effort to put out the “next big thing” in the tech world. A couple of double-crosses later, you have the plot of the film. In fact, Oldman & Ford are really the only aspects of this movie that made it worth seeing. Individually they played their characters very, very well, but together they were even better. I wish there had been more of these two and much less of Hemsworth.
In the end, Paranoia turns out to be a film that had the potential, but just missed its mark. An intriguing story and strong supporting characters can’t overcome the cliché romance and poor acting from the main characters. I can’t say that I would recommend this one. Do yourselves a favor, and steer clear of Paranoia.