PAYBACK
Gibson is Porter, a professional thief and all-around bad guy. We are
shown this by an opening sequence where he steals from homeless people,
uses stolen credit cards to purchase illegal weapons, and has lunch in a
diner without leaving a tip. After collaborating with a friend named Val
Resnick (Gregg Henry) to steal $140,000, he prepares to split the money
50-50. But Val wants more than $70,000, because he has an outstanding loan
with the crime syndicate of which he is a member, so he shoots Porter and
leaves him for dead. But Porter is not dead, and that is Val's mistake.
Porter spends the rest of the film working his way up the corporate ladder
of the syndicate to get his 70 grand. After finding Val (with a high-priced,
sado-masochistic prostitute named Pearl, played to the hilt by Ally McBeal's
Lucy Alexis Liu), he reunites with an old girlfriend (Maria Bello) who helps
him find Val's bosses. He meets the cool and collected Carter (William Devane),
the brash and countrified Fairfax (James Coburn), and finally, the top tamale
himself, Bronson (Kris Kristofferson). Regularly eluding the henchmen and
brazenly threatening the bosses, he amazes everyone by his relentless pursuit
of a mere $70,000. Meanwhile, he also must evade the guys from whom he and
Val stole the money, and a couple of crooked detectives who demand part
of the booty in return for not blowing the whistle.
Gibson, like many actors, has made a profitable career playing the same character over and over. Though William Wallace (Braveheart) was a nice departure, his Porter is a warmed-over version of Riggs (Lethal Weapon), who was a cleaned-up version of Mad Max. But maybe the fact that his company, Icon, produced Payback made him see to it that the film had a well-balanced cast. Helgeland's script has him performing super-human stunts when he has been beaten, shot, and blown up, but the careful balance between action and humor does a great deal to make it a film that is worth watching.****