Payback

A stylish noir-gangster movie with a persuasive Mel Gibson in the lead role of a hardened thief, Porter. Helgeland managed to reproduce the exact atmosphere of most of Donald E. Westlake's books (Payback was based on "The Hunter" published under the pseudonym Richard Stark) and shows a world full of villains, junkies, hookers, corrupt cops, sadists and just plain idiots with whom the main character encounters. Accompanied by a sarcastic voice-over monologue, Porter slowly works his way to his seventy thousand dollars which was stolen from him by his partner Val and his wife. The way in which he eliminates all obstacles is simply cool, and you have to keep your fingers crossed for him even if you don't want to. After a while you don’t mind the plot’s predictability, and that you’ve seen this somewhere before, as you get carried away by a world that's as hard as scotch-soaked kidneys, but also damn relatable. My personal Top 20. (11/09/2006)

The brutality suits noir-themed crime stories quite well. On a journey for revenge, Mel Gibson, as a tough guy with a steel gaze, loves a beautiful prostitute, seeks out a traitor, and encounters – uh – a sadistic dominatrix leading an Asian gang. I can't remember the last time I used that word, but Payback is a cool movie, with a perfect cold look, and some scenes are amazingly uncompromising in their brutality, but unfortunately, everything is always just tough, and throughout the whole time, I didn't experience any significant twist that would have affected me in any way. Brian Helgeland relies on stylish form, but the essence constantly eludes him. (11/06/2007)

No more Mr. Nice Guy. A bombastic neo-noir where the cast is unforgettable and on point. Brilliant one-liners and a perfectly constructed ending (one of the few cases where the studio’s intervention improved the movie, which I can say after watching Helgeland’s director cut Payback: Straight Up – that one simply seemed weaker…) I will always enjoy revisiting this one! This is one of the films you always want to come back to. Five stars! (26/04/2018)

Helgeland managed a fairly decent mix of the gritty dude, Lethal Weapon, and the Tarantino crude gangster poetics, in which brutality is sort of danced, humorous, casual. Payback is no directorial opus magni - it is a rather routine film, which owes most of its great moments to the script and to the excellent Mel Gibson, who capitalized on his many years of experience in detective Riggs' skin, only to stand on the opposite side of the barricade. Thanks to him the incredibly stubborn thief Porter becomes a character almost humorously dangerous, who, with raw willfulness, walks through the reinforced concrete barricade for the smallest thing. The central character is the central value of Payback. We otherwise do not find anything particularly original or memorable here, everything works for the benefit of the whole and the result is a quality gangster film from the rough school that delights even with its decent ending. (29/11/2005)

I really didn’t expect this to be such a stylized hit. I usually associate Brian Helgeland with quality screenplays, but here he not only took on the director’s chair but also created an incredibly old-school detective film in every way. Mel Gibson fit the lead role perfectly; his character, Porter, took his quest for revenge (which is more principled than personal) perhaps a bit too seriously, ruthlessly eliminating one villain after another. However, he can’t be classified as a hero; rather, quite the opposite (he hardly smiles throughout the film, making him someone you’d prefer to stay on good terms with at all costs). The dark blue filter had a certain visual appeal; at times, I wondered if the film was inspired by a comic book. The film also doesn’t lack originality, offering a few carefully crafted plot twists that genuinely surprised me. By the end, it picked up considerable pace, with perfect one-liners escalating exponentially, and I’m simply amazed. In terms of the genre, few films can compete with it; such a stylish, dark noir crime film is a rare sight. I give it 87%. (06/05/2019)