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Arachnophobia - DVD
Writer: Brian HelgelandDirector: Brian Helgeland Producer: Bruce Davey & Stephen McEveety Studio: Paramount Features:Chapter Search, Trailer, Production Featurette VIDEO Widescreen 1.85:1, ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 5.1 [CC] Characters: Porter - Mel Gibson Val - Gregg Henry Rosie - Maria Bello Pearl - Lucy Liu Review: Payback's trailer would have you believe that you're about to root for the bad guy. In a way that's true, but not really. You see, Porter (Mel Gibson) is a bad guy in the strictest sense of the word, but he's the least bad of all the guys around, so he's actually the good guy (sort of). Porter has been screwed out of seventy grand by his ex-partner, Val (Gregg Henry) and his (Porter's) wife (Deborah Unger). In a true case of nothing but bad luck, Porter ends up getting screwed after a heist where everything went right. Porter ends up getting shot in the back by his wife, and after much recovery time (which, thankfully, we don't see), he's coming after Val to get his money. One problem, though, Val has joined "the outfit" (the syndicate, the mafia, the boys, you know...), and as such has a fair amount of protection around him. No problem, Porter will simply take down the outfit as well. Payback is ultimately a movie about revenge, and a hard-edged, dark movie about revenge at that. Gibson plays Porter with great conviction, rattling off his lines in a deadpan, gravelly voice which seems more suited to a Mickey Spillane movie than Mel Gibson. He wanders from place to place, allowing himself to be sucked into deeper and deeper trouble through his own inaction more than anything else. You see, Porter is a slacker criminal, and as such prefers to take the easy way rather than the hard one. He still doesn't like getting screwed out of his seventy grand, though. In fact, Porter is a lot like that newspaper kid in Better Off Dead...the one who rides his bike down the ski hill droning over and over again, "I want my two dollars". That's not to say the movie is a comedy. In fact, the film is surprisingly bereft of tension-breaking humour. This works to the film's advantage, though, in that it allows us to become absorbed in the world of the characters. Rather than getting your typical Mel, Arnold, Stallone, You can thank the lively universe on writer/director Brian Helgeland. He's the same man responsible for L.A. Confidential, but also the same man responsible for 976-EVIL and The Postman. When Helgeland's films work, they work on an incredible level, and when they don't work, they flounder like so much smelly fish. In the case of Payback, the film works for the most part. The only part which didn't really work for me was the ending. It felt a little too "neat" for such a dark and messy film. In this case, though, I don't blame Helgeland because I know the ending was not his choice, or his decision. Mel Gibson's Icon productions (and thus, Mel Gibson himself) is responsible for this production, and for its ending. They decided that Helgeland's ending was "too dark", and inserted their own studio "happy cut" like so many films before it (Blade Runner and Brazil to name just two). And like those films before it, Payback suffered from the interference, as the ending is simply incongruent with the rest of the film. The DVD itself is fairly good quality. Paramount has created a nice transfer, with a good sound mix, and the image is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Extra features are light, consisting only of the teaser trailer, regular theatrical trailer and a short production featurette. The featurette is not terrible, but isn't going to shed any new light on the film or its production problems, either. It'd be interesting to see a film like this receive the 12 Monkeys treatment at some point, but given Mel Gibson's power in Hollywood, I wouldn't hold my breath. At best, we can hope for a version with the restored ending in ten years, but even that seems unlikely at this point. I'd recommend Payback as a rental for anybody who likes hard-boiled action thrillers. Given the way the ending wraps up, I'm not so confident it would stand up well to repeat viewing, so a DVD purchase is very much a caveat emptor situation. Rent it first, buy it if you really like it. Ken Pierce Dvdken@home.com Contributing Editor, www.dvdfuture.com |
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