Payback (Mel Gibson) : Blu Ray Review
November 29, 2009 by Sean Lynch
Filed under Blu Ray Reviews, DVD & Blu Ray, Movies
Mel Gibson as an unapologetic, 1970s-esque violent antihero who doesn’t get exactly what he wants at the end of the flick… pfft, as if that would ever make it to screens.
What? What’s that? It didn’t? You mean Gibson’s production company re-cut and re-shot the holy hell out of it until Payback (Version 1999) resembled a campy Lethal Weapon instalment that a major studio would actually agree to releasing?
Well that makes sense.
However, 1999’s loss is Blu Ray DVD’s gain – and while neither versions of the film are actually any good… it must be said that the Directors Cut and Theatrical Version sitting side-by-side on the same disc is one of the finest examples of a distributor using the medium correctly.
It’s actually quite impressive. Most “Directors Cut” DVDs are major cop-outs, perhaps a few extra scenes here or there, a tad more blood. But what Payback offers up here is two COMPLETELY different films and that has to be commended.
One is uber gritty and dark and the way it was intended to be, the other proves just how much studios water down movies and can destroy them (as was reportedly the case for Babylon AD and even comedies like Fanboys).
A remake of sorts of Lee Marvin’s Point Blank (which itself was an adaption of a book), Payback stars Mel Gibson as Porter, a career criminal bent on revenge after his partners in a street heist fill him full of lead and scarper off with his $70,000 cut.
Bad move…
Porter soon resurfaces, and starts laying waste to a grubby urban underworld of syndicate kingpins, cops on the take, sniveling informants and deadly gangs.
As is often the case with these Blu Ray conversions of flicks shot in a pre-digital age, the images are so clear it actually works against it (very grainy indeed). That said, the colour and sound is excellent – and if you love to see bullets fly, make sure the surround sound is on so you can enjoy the bevvy of bullets whizz by your ears.
WATCH OUT FOR
Gibson throwing in a mouth guard and driving head on into a car of Asian thugs who “forgot to wear their seatbelts”. That’s the Mad Max we’ve come to know and love!
