Brian Helgeland's Payback is the second film to be adapted from Richard Stark's bitter and brilliant crime novel The Hunter. Stark was actually a pen name for the late, great Donald E. Westlake, who passed away last New Year's Eve. His prolific career included an Oscar-nominated screenplay for Stephen Frears' The Grifters and the pulp novel The Jugger, which was adapted, loosely, by Jean-Luc Godard in his colorful pop two-step Made in USA. Yet, despite a hefty anthology, The Hunter seems to stick out as a favorite for many.

The first film to be adapted from it was John Boorman's stylized crime sonnet Point Blank, which cast Lee Marvin as Walker, a bare-bones hood out to take revenge on his one-time partner and his wife after they try to off him after a big score. In Helgeland's world, however, Walker has been reverted back to Porter, the name the vengeful crook had in the Stark's novel, and is played by a pre-Passionate Mel Gibson with a hard-boiled chip on his shoulder. A fragmented west coast dystopia is traded for the dirty, slummy east, and the relatively lean plot gets smothered in a ladle-full of peripheral characters, twists, and structural detours of no consequence.

Notoriously, writer/director Helgeland was fired from the film and Payback got manhandled by rewrites and reshoots that made it into the wholly entertaining pulp nonsense it is. A director's cut was made with fewer characters and a more streamlined progression, but it still remains a bloody wreckage of a film steeped in and overflowing with juicy clichés.

The film opens with an excellent sequence narrated by Porter, kick-started by the sight of the hero's back-room doctor gulping down a glass of whiskey before he fills it again to clean his tools. Two bullets are yanked out and Porter is up and ready for action again, determined to get back his stolen 70 grand and feed a bullet to Resnick (a great Gregg Henry), the slimy partner who shot him and took his woman. But, as it turns out, Resnick is a bottom-of-the-barrel insect in relation to the pack of crime lords known as the Syndicate who employ the worm.

As he climbs the ladder from hunting down Resnick and sweaty heroin huckster Stegman (David Paymer), Porter also makes time with Rosie (Maria Bello), a call girl he used to bodyguard and with whom he had a one-night-stand. There's also the Asian gang who wants retribution for the money Porter and Resnick stole and who are aided, for reasons beyond this reviewer's ken, by a violent escort (Lucy Liu). Porter finally must face-off with the two heads of the Syndicate: the cigar-chomping Fairfax (James Coburn) and the steel-cool Bronson (Kris Kristofferson).

From the moment Resnick and Porter meet for the final time, Helgeland's film goes gloriously over-the-top. Payback is a stupid movie but it certainly isn't a lazy one, nor a boring one for that matter; As swollen noir-tinged disasters go, Payback is one of the very best. For its cast, especially Gibson, it looks like too much fun to care, rummaging through a laundry-list of pulp clichés and feasting on the meatiest bits. Their glee is infectious.

The new director's cut features a somewhat different (and still just 90 minutes long) cut of the film which I found more satisfying than the original, plus a commentary from Helgeland and four featurettes (one focusing on the differences between the theatrical cut of the film and this version).



Take off your jacket and stay awhile.