PAYBACK *½ (out of four) -a review by Bill Chambers ( payback@filmfreakcentral.net )
(Come with me to the casbah--Film Freak Central: http://filmfreakcentral.net )
starring Mel Gibson, Gregg Henry, Maria Bello, Kris Kristofferson screenplay by Brian Helgeland and Terry Hayes, based on the novel "The Hunter" by Richard Stark directed by Brian Helgeland
Ladies and gentlemen, Payback is the most expensive episode of "The Equalizer" I've ever seen.
Gibson plays Porter, a burglar shot and left for dead by his wife (Deborah Kara Unger, in an all-too-brief cameo) and partner (Henry) after a successful heist. As a morgue attendant sets about removing the bullets from Porter's back, Porter miraculously springs back to life. He makes it his mission, as a walking dead man without a conscience, to exact revenge on those who screwed him and reclaim his share of the loot. (In a running gag, Porter demands $70 000, but everybody mishears him and assumes he's after the entire $130 000 haul.) In his travels (or travails), Porter encounters several other one-named villainous cretins like Fairfax (James Coburn as a white-haired, millionaire thief) and Carter (Kristofferson, as a brown-haired, millionaire thief-the kingpin of the obligatory "operation").
Helgeland's film (which was recut by Mel the Producer) is devoid of an imperative dime store charm. The novelty of seeing a big movie star mercilessly dispatching criminals wears off quickly: a) because the bad guys can only be differentiated by their coifs, and b) because Mel's schtick doesn't evolve from act one-he's The Terminator stranded in a plot without a sci-fi hook to keep us interested after the initial sadistic thrill is gone. Payback should have been called Playback: it's a 102-minute loop of the same short sequence. (Mel: "I want my money." Anonymous Villain: "No." Mel shoots gun. Anonymous villain dies. Mel meets up with his hooker friend (Bello). Second verse, same as the first.) It's not Porter's single-mindedness that robs the film of snap, crackle, and pop; as a character who has already "died" once, he has nothing to lose and so much to gain. The movie lacks danger. The only thing Porter is in jeopardy of is putting the audience to sleep.
Payback has a gritty, metallic look to it that also becomes monotonous; its cinematography would be more appropriate in one of those bleak urban psychodramas that come out of England every couple of months. (Director of photography Ericson Core should have been fired early on for lighting Bello, so va-va-va-voom in Permanant Midnight, to look like a potato in a Gregg Allman wig.)
To analyze such mediocrity is to grant Payback far more attention than it deserves. Perhaps only someone as experienced with antagonists-as-protagonists as Tarantino-look what he did with the similar hero-less botched-robbery tale Reservoir Dogs-could have pulled off this material (a loose remake of John Boorman's Point Blank). The movie presents us with the conventions of pulp fiction (all women are femme fatales; even the cops are in on it, etc.) and crosses them with the conventions of cheesy TV crime melodramas (death is never in the cards for the main character, etc.) but transcends neither.
-February, 1999
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