Okay, here's the deal. Consider yourself a mad scientist in this little scenario. You've decided to make a monster. You put your little head mirror on, strapped on the leather apron, and the beakers and test tubes are bubbling merrily around you. You've even gone as far as to hire a hunchback assistant from the local temp agency, who barks, "Yes, master" on cue. You're all set.
But, what do you make your monster out of? It always helps when there's a good person to corrupt, so let's do that. Let's pick some actor who's known for his "hero" persona, and make him into an evil persona. Cool, huh? Wait, though.... Who to pick? John Travolta? Been done, as a psycho junkie with a cool sense of humor in Pulp Fiction, and as a raving nutcase pilot in Broken Arrow. Nic Cage? Done, as a tag team with Travolta in Face/Off, and as just an all-round loser in Leaving Las Vegas. Can't use Kevin Spacey, or Tom Cruise, or even Brad Pitt, for that matter. Okay, Pitt's a stretch, because he was technically a good guy in Vampire, but, hey, undead is undead. Keep flipping through the catalogue... Sinise? Nope. Feinnes? Nope. Banderas? Sorry, the "undead" rule applies there, too. Baldwin Boys? With a "free space," that's a big BINGO on the evil board. This ain't as easy as it seemed, is it?
Most everyone in LaLaLand has had his or her moment in the dark, so to speak. Go as far back as you'd care to, you'll find that most every high Hollywood name has done a trip or two down the wrong side of the street, into the dark alleys and dirty rooms of evil. Some used it as a starting point, like Nicholson and DeNiro. Some use it to "stretch their legs," like Hopkins and Cruise. Travolta used it as a springboard back into gates of Paradise West. Even Ronny Howard had his Grand Theft Auto, which was about as bad as he got.
Leave it to Mel Gibson to roll the dice and try his hand at a nasty character. Give him credit, I guess, Mad Max wasn't all pasteurized milk and Oreo cookies, but he was basically a hero there. We did get to see a flash or two of uncaring hatred as Ransom unfurled, especially the deadeye stare he got towards the last ten minutes. But, now, in his new movie, Payback, we get to see Mel in a whole new light. Or, dark, as it were.
Mel plays Porter, a career thief who boosts $140,000 with the help of his junked-up wife (Deborah Kara Unger) and his best friend Val (Gregg Henry.) But, as thieves and junkies are want to do, they double-cross Porter and leave him for dead. Problem is, Porter ain't dead. He's pissed. And he wants his cut of the money. So he gets into the graces of an organized crime syndicate (called, rather uncreatively, "The Outfit"), thanks to a convenient stereotype that happens by. In this case, it's the hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold, here named Rosie (Maria Bello). Dare I spoil a plotline and tell you that senseless violence ensues forthwith? I think I shall dare... Bang-bang, go-boom, more bang-bang....
Folks, if this sounds reasonably familiar, good for you. It's a remake of a very slick John Boorman movie called Point Blank, with Lee Marvin in the role of the wronged bad guy/good guy. That movie is a kickin' little trip down the dark side, 'cause everyone in Point Blank is just nasty and dead-eyed. Everyone has that same look that Chow Yun Fat had in all those fantastic John Woo movies. Here, though, we find a definite case of '90s-itis has worked its way into the spirit, and it spoils everything.
Director Brian Helgeland decided, for whatever reason, to stir up two frames of thought here. One, he wanted a gray, noir-esque hard-line movie about the ruthlessness of criminals. And, that's a good thing, if he stayed with that. He sets his movie in an unnamed city, where everything is bland and gray and generic. But, then he stirs in a heaping helping of Schwarzenegger style, making almost every scene a set-up for some "witty" punchline or gunpop. And, to ice this cake into mediocrity, he makes Porter one of those cartoon anti-heroes that can get the hell beat out of him a hundred times and still keep going, and slip unnoticed into Fort Knox carrying a bazooka and a 50-gallon drum of nitroglycerine (okay, I'm being facetious now, but you know what I mean.) Any of these, from start to finish, would have probably worked, but the combo plate is just not welcome on this table, Brian. You wrote L.A. Confidential, pal, you oughta know what makes a gritty thriller. But, then again, you also wrote The Postman, so maybe you don't.
Gibson does a fair to middlin' job with the part of Porter, but he keeps having to break the icy character with one-liners, and that helps nothing. It makes Porter only a step or two away from Riggs, Mel's Lethal Weapon series role. We like that one fine, because, ultimately, we know Riggs will be golden in the end. Porter's never going to be golden, and probably wouldn't if he could. Why then, try to make him redeemable one minute and a cold-blooded murderer the next? It almost comes as a welcome sigh when we do get to see the Mel we all know come through every now and then, but it robs the Porter character of any hope of being believable.
Padding him down with a lame supporting cast undercuts the cause too. Deborah Unger makes about as believable a junkie as those dudes in Reefer Madness. Bello's Rosie the Wonder Whore is almost laughable. Gregg Henry spends the movie trying to do a bad impression of Michael Masden in Reservoir Dogs. It's almost sad that the best support Mel gets comes from old-timers James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. Kris is becoming quite a good nasty, as seen in Lone Star and, briefly, here. His voice carries it a lot, and he has that bad weathered look. Coburn, too, has always been good in the role of "bad guy you love," from The Magnificent Seven on. Problem is, neither are in the movie long enough. Same goes for William Devane, who's made a second career out of his high-class thug routine, both on TV and in movies.
That only leaves minor roles to be memorable, if at all. David Paymer chalks up yet another supporting role (his resume must be a mile long by now) playing a small-time hood, somewhat reminiscent of his small-time hood in Get Shorty. And John Glover pops up as yet another weasel. If there is a small glimmer, though, it comes from Lucy Liu, AWOL from "Ally McBeal" (thank the gods....). She gets to shine as a dominatrix who goes plum wiggly when a customer of hers gets threatened by a gun.
It's a script full of cheats and back doors to begin with, and Helgeland's three-sided storytelling only makes it worse. It does, however, allow an interesting thing to occur. Every now and then, we do get to see the side of Mel that one can only assume we were supposed to see much more of. He does, indeed, play bad very good. I found myself thinking more than once of Yun Fat in those John Woo movies. Yun Fat has become a minor legend in the movie world for being a superhero in Hong Kong cinema. The Woo/Yun Fat movies are full of incredible shootouts, stunts, and blood and other fluids flying all over the place, but the mystique comes in Yun Fat's complete lack of emotion about it. He's as blank as a Kansas highway, no matter if he's playing the piano and drinking tequila slammers, or going through clips of bullets like a Tasmanian Devil through a wedding cake, whirling and jumping and shooting and killing. Every now and then, we get to see Mel like that, and you harken back to that cold stare at the end of the first Mad Max. Might not be just a coincidence that Mel chose to make this movie. Maybe he's trying to get back to his roots a bit.
Look, I can't sit here and tell you to forget about seeing this movie. I'd have better luck trying to stop a dam break with a push broom than try to tell people not to go see a new Mel Gibson movie. I will tell you this, though. If you're going looking for the Mel we all know and love, you're definitely barking up the wrong tree here. Your money would be better spent at the Rent-A-Flick down the street, where you can get three or four good choices of Mel Pure than this watered-down version we've been given here.
At best, this is an okay film. It suffers from too many ailments to be good, but it saves itself enough to not be crappy. If that's a recommendation you like, then, by all means, go see Payback. If you get exactly what I'm saying, you're better off waiting for this to hit a video shelf, where you can make it the second of a trilogy of Mel Movies. Wrapping it in gold might just make it go down a lot smoother.
Image copyright Paramount Pictures.
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under the knife