Payback

When it premiered, I gave Payback 4 stars and I must admit with a certain blush that it charmed me in its own way - and I am not a fan of the genre or even Mel Gibson. It is a film made with ease and it is straightforward, simple, genre-pure, and a cool ride where the pace never slackens and the usual clichés are presented tastefully and with a pervasive sense of irony. On the other hand, as the years went by and I read the book, it impressed me much more with its darkness, complexity, and ambiguity. Besides, it is impossible not to notice how the film approaches the character of the violent, murderous, and thieving protagonist, presenting him to the viewer as a likable rascal. This story is hard to believe, and I left behind my teenage years when I would have identified with this portrayal a long time ago. Overall impression: 60%. (05/27/2020)

A brilliantly built-up thriller with a pace that is simply unreal in the second half. And yet so little is enough... Just steal $140,000 (no, sorry, just $70,000) from Mel Gibson and you'll unleash the kind of carousel of murders, shootouts and badass one-liners that we only remember from the first Die Hard. Gibson shines in his role and enjoys it to the fullest, but the supporting characters are also given a memorable portrayal by the actors, whether I'm thinking of the bad guys Henry, Kristofferson and Coburn or the pretty sharp hooker Lucy Liu. Simple, straightforward, harsh – just the way it should be. (07/23/2012)

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. (11/29/2005)

I've always liked Mel Gibson and in this tough thriller, where he plays an action hero, he simply fits. The whole thing is stylized, as if it was almost shot based on a comic book. It was based on a novel, but the visual side was managed well. It's properly tough, the story is not completely stupid, on the contrary, it's quite elaborate. I liked this movie once and nothing has changed even after some time. (05/07/2014)

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. (09/11/2006)