Payback
dir. Brian Helgeland
Paramount Pictures

The kneejerk response that all remakes are creatively bankrupt is closed-minded, and out of fairness, you're inclined to let each movie speak for itself. The depth of Payback's blight, however, can really only be put into proper relief by considering its better incarnation, John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank. Both films take their inspiration from Richard Stark's (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake) novel about a betrayed thief's attempt to get his share of the loot. Where the earlier movie drew from the book a rich and mystical tapestry, however, Payback is entirely superficial.

Payback's opening scene—of Mel Gibson, as career criminal Porter, being operated on after a shootout we later witness—establishes, through its gruesome detail and lavishly gritty look, writer/director Brian Helgeland's intention to combine the spirit of early '70s action thrillers with '90s-caliber viscera. The scene also introduces Gibson's voice-over narration, which reveals that he can be a flint-edged wiseacre even in the face of excruciating pain. The credits haven't even rolled yet, and you pretty much have the arc of the whole movie defined.

About the only thing not fully accounted for at this point in the film is just how compromised Mel Gibson's character is. The movie's ads demand: "Get ready to root for the bad guy," but, in movie algebra, Porter is no bad guy. He's motivated by a sense of fair play, he only steals from other criminals, he only kills other criminals, and he loves both his treacherous, overdose-destined wife and his hooker-with-a heart-of-gold ex-girlfriend and her pet dog. How is this any "worse" than Gibson's characters in Mad Max or Lethal Weapon or his amateur epic Braveheart?

If the tagline was "Get ready to root for the bad character," then it would make sense. Scoundrel as saint, with flippancy and soft-heartedness as his only virtues? The only thing as boring and tired as this archetype is Gibson's incarnation of it. Calling Gibson a bad guy is just a pomo justification for the nonstop sadism the film portrays, but it doesn't wash.

These tonal difficulties throw off everything the movie includes in an attempt to be interesting, and it's here that the comparisons with Point Blank are most useful. Boorman's must-see masterpiece really scored in that its gangster protagonist—the inimitable Lee Marvin—never killed anyone when he sought his compensation; they all basically died by their own hands. Payback's only pleasure is watching Gibson clean house with a bunch of lowlife types in whatever clever ways Helgeland can devise, but it's a pretty mean pleasure. Moreover, Payback vies for the arch jokes of Point Blank about the bureaucracy of crime and the absence of trust in the criminal realm, but when those ideas register at all, it's at the gag level.

It takes a particular unity of structure to get the payoff of themes like that, and it has been well established that Helgeland had control of the film wrested away from him by Gibson. You can tell, not only because Payback reeks of a vanity project, but because it has so little depth. Helgeland hasn't exactly established himself as a filmmaker of the highest quality (this is his directorial debut; he wrote The Postman and Conspiracy Theory and cowrote L.A. Confidential), but he must have had something more substantial in mind when he picked up his camera. In secondary roles, Gregg Henry, David Paymer and James Coburn all amuse, and Chris Boardman's score is spot-on, but those hardly justify enduring this soft-boiled pap.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)