Payback

Hollywood is chasing its tail again. Payback is a new version of Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, which was brilliantly filmed in 1967 as Point Blank. Mel Gibson takes the Lee Marvin role of a heister who, left for dead by his double-crossing partner (Gregg Henry) and wife (Deborah Kara Unger) after a big job, comes back for revenge and his share of the loot. In pursuit of the latter, he eventually confronts the three leaders (William Devane, James Coburn, and Kris Kristofferson) of the local mob.

First-time director Brian Helgeland (who co-wrote L.A. Confidential) has made Payback an entertaining neo-noir, self-conscious and stylized but not too cute, respecting the tradition while delivering for those who just want to see the kind of movie where Mel Gibson shoots some people. People in this film also get bumped, whacked, smashed, hammered, upsided, battered, beaten, and blown up. The hyperbolic violence is '90s; the music is '50s to late '60s (plus, "President Nixon" is mentioned and Gibson smokes a lot); the cars, costumes, and decor mix periods from the late '60s to the present. Payback's city is a group of oblique Cinemascope studies in steel gray, less a real place than a movie set of Downtown Nowhere.

Point Blank made its system-beating hero a remote icon, modern man as zombie. Payback tries to bring him closer to us by giving him a cliché'd voiceover narration and a big I-need-you scene with the helpful hooker who befriends him (Maria Bello). Helgeland doesn't succeed in this endeavor, and neither does he need to: both movie and hero work effectively on a purely mechanical level.

-- Chris Fujiwara