Payback

For whom the Mel tolls...

When Porter (Mel Gibson) and his partner Val Resnick (Gregg Henry) rob a bunch of Chinese mobsters, the last thing Porter expects is to be left for dead, having been double-crossed by Val and shot in the back by his wife, Lynn (Deborah Unger). He survives and decides to hunt the two down, and get his money back. His task is complicated by the fact that there are a lot of other parties interested in the money, not least the Chinese, but also a couple of bent cops and a whole syndicate of bad guys.

Director Brian Helgeland's career so far has ranged from the excellent L.A. Confidential to the God-awful Assassins. He has worked with Gibson before (on Conspiracy Theory).The film is intended to be a darkly humorous and slick thriller, along the lines of Get Shorty, but with more violence (The tagline is " Get ready to root for the Bad Guy"). There are a few problems with this approach. The first is that this movie is rather violent, with plenty of killing. Since some of the film's punchlines involve somebody dying violently, it makes the average viewer a little uncomfortable about laughing at such moments. A subplot involving a female sadomasochist offers the audience the opportunity to laugh at her taking a beating; a dubious pleasure.

To say that most of the film's characters are not very smart is an understatement - some of the most stupid bad guys ever committed to celluloid reside within Payback. Porter wants revenge and his share of the money from the Chinese heist. Unfortunately (both for him and almost everyone else he meets), Resnick has used to money to pay off a crime syndicate which is led by a smoothtalking mobster called Carter (played as an oily smoothie by William Devane). Carter decides to have Porter killed to avoid any problems for his organisation. Porter also attracts the attention of a couple of crooked detectives, Hicks and Leary (played unsuccessfully for laughs by Bill Dukes and Jack Conly) who want the money, and the Chinese mobsters themselves are also hunting Porter (whose depiction would be racist except that everyone gets a raw deal in this movie).

Porter's various efforts to get his money back are both clever and stupid, sometimes both within the same scene. The film also relies too much on coincidence (never a good sign in a movie). Raymond Chandler (who scripted classics such as The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity) used to claim that, whenever he got stuck on a plot detail, he would 'invent a body', figuring that he could explain it away later in his story. Helgeland seems to have the same approach, but his script lacks the dry wit or style of Chandler.

The film lacks the courage of its own convictions, too. Porter's wife is his first target but he doesn't get to kill her (she dies accidentally, from a drug overdose). Even his encounter with his former partner, Resnick, is more self-defence than cold-blooded revenge. Sure, Porter gets to kill a few defenceless people later in the film, but since they were really bad guys, the audience won't mind so much. Gibson seems unsure whether his character is supposed to be sympathetic or scary. The result is that he is neither.

I never though I would ever write this sentence but what this movie needs is Bruce Willis. Mel Gibson is just not convincing as a ruthless gangster obsessed with murder and revenge, and his ability to take constant beatings, gunshot wounds and torture recall his adventures as Detective Martin Riggs. Willis, for all his flaws, could have played this with more tongue-in-cheek.

If Helgeland has taken Point Blank (John Boorman's 1967 classic, with Lee Marvin ) as his inspiration, the result is, unfortunately, Lethal Weapon 5. Not much of a tribute.

Directed by Brian Helgeland.

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