Movies
Payback
Brian Helgeland, who came to prominence as co-screenwriter of L.A. Confidential, has chosen for his directorial debut to do a rehash of John Boorman's Point Blank, though it is not so much warmed over as served straight from the freezer, with a thin decolorizing layer of frost on it. The distinctive, if somewhat overrated 1967 version was, among other things, an important prototype of what a film noir might look like in color, and on that score Helgeland's blanket of ice crystals makes a pale substitute. On other scores, also, the neophyte comes up short. One of the more unusual aspects of the Boorman film is that, as the lawless double-crossed hero bulls his way through the swanky offices and penthouses of the corporate crime syndicate in order to recover a chicken-feed debt, he incurs no first-hand, bloodied-hand responsibility for any of the resulting deaths. One way or another, the casualties all do themselves in. And while the audience may have been encouraged to enjoy the humiliation of the bigwigs, the avenger himself can take no pleasure in it. Reincarnated in the person of Mel Gibson, by contrast, he racks up more kills than he has fingers to keep count, and he is sentimentalized both as a triumphant underdog and as an eternal torch-carrier for an unsullied call girl. More simply, Mel Gibson is no Lee Marvin. For all the creeping routineness, Helgeland's handling of the conventions of the genre is robotically efficient, and the S&M element, though faint-heartedly softened with comedy, is not old-hat. Maria Bello, Gregg Henry, David Paymer, Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn. 1999.
— Duncan Shepherd
Reader Rating:
- MPAA Rating: R
