"Paycheck" is a John Woo-directed science fiction thriller, with Ben Affleck as a brilliant tech engineer whose work contract requires that the memory of his work tenure be burned away after he completes a top-secret three-year job, plunging him into confusion and danger.

Unfortunately, after watching "Paycheck," you may wish you had the picture's gimmickry at your disposal, so you could erase your own memory of it.

I thought Woo got a bad rap for his last picture, the widely disparaged, operatically violent World War II movie "Windtalkers." But "Paycheck" is slick dreck, well-done but ridiculous -- even though the source was a story by the great nightmare-spinner Philip K. Dick ("Blade Runner"). Like most Dick tales, it's based on a scary premise that writer Dean Georgaris tries vainly to make scarier. Engineer Michael Jennings not only has all his work memories wiped out by his boss, affable but sinister Jimmy Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart), but to his amazement, he discovers that the law is on his tail and that he has forfeited his eight-figure salary for a bagful of seemingly worthless objects: keys, tickets, scraps of paper and other flotsam.

Soon Jennings is on the lam from two relentless FBI agents, Dodge (Joe Morton) and Klein (Michael C. Hall), and also from ex-boss Rethrick and his even more sinister henchman, Wolf (Colm Feore). Jennings' only allies are his scruffy little manager Shorty (Paul Giamatti) and fellow Rethrick employee Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman), with whom he apparently had an affair during his blackout period. But, incredibly, all those "worthless" objects turn out to have beneficial qualities in tight spots: opening doors, guiding him from danger, repeatedly saving his life.

Could it be that somewhere there's a machine that helped Jennings read the future? Watching "Paycheck," you may feel you can read the future yourself; nothing in the movie is a surprise. Woo is an action movie master, but here, not even the crash-bang pyrotechnics jolt you much. Affleck plays the entire movie like a slick young executive unaccountably plagued by over-zealous cops, and Thurman, not a face you'd forget, has lines that are instantly forgettable.

You can't say Dick's work has been butchered here, because "Paycheck" is one of his early stories, published in the second tier sci-fi magazine Imagination in 1953. Though the tale throbs with McCarthy-era paranoia, it was obviously written in a rush, albeit by a genius writer; unlike Spielberg's "Minority Report," taken from a similar story, it hasn't been improved in the movie. Why, one wonders, do Hollywood screenwriters keep adapting so many Dick short stories, which always need padding -- while they mostly ignore the idea-rich novels, some of which, including "The Man in the High Castle," "Time out of Joint" and "A Scanner Darkly," would make much better movies?

Perhaps it's because the stories, so tense and fast, with such ingenious premises, read like movie treatments. But it's an illusion.