Paranoia (2013)

Paranoia arrives in 2013 as a corporate espionage thriller assembled from parts so familiar they might have been ordered from a catalog. Liam Hemsworth plays Adam Cassidy, a bright young inventor who is fired, blackmailed, and then installed as a spy inside a rival firm run by Harrison Ford. Gary Oldman glowers from the other corner of the boardroom. Two titans of industry destroy each other over a prototype. The film treats this as tragedy, though mostly it plays as a showroom for glass elevators.

The picture's progressive credentials are thin to the point of transparency. The cast is white in the way that studio casting often was, with Angela Sarafyan and Nickson Ruto drifting through incidental roles and little else. Amber Heard's Emma holds a marketing director title, but the screenplay assigns her one job: to be kissed, then betrayed, then kissed again. Her thumbprint, lifted from a spoon, becomes the key to the vault. She is a credential, not a character. No other social currents stir here. No racial reckoning, no environmental worry, no inquiry into bodies or minds that deviate from the glossy norm. Even the corporate critique stays personal. The villains are bad men, not a bad system, and the hero's reward is a scrappy Brooklyn startup, which is the gentlest possible rebuke to the boardroom.

What remains is craft without conviction. The film never stops to instruct us, which is a small mercy, and it never asks us to feel anything beyond the mild tension of a stolen phone. Critics were unkind. Audiences shrugged. The whole enterprise suggests a movie made by people who had seen other movies and assumed that was sufficient. It was not.