Payback: Straight Up (2006) The Director's Cut
BRRip 480p - TinyBearDs | MKV | 848 x 350 | x264 600kbps 23.976fps | HE-AACv2 64kbps 2CH
Language: English | Subtitle: English Included | 90min | 429.05MB
Genre: Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller
IMDb Rating: 7.9/10 (2,311 users)
BRRip 480p - TinyBearDs | MKV | 848 x 350 | x264 600kbps 23.976fps | HE-AACv2 64kbps 2CH
Language: English | Subtitle: English Included | 90min | 429.05MB
Genre: Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller
IMDb Rating: 7.9/10 (2,311 users)
Director: Brian Helgeland
Porter is shot by his wife and best friend and is left to die. When he survives he plots revenge.
Amazon.com's Review:
There were reasons writer-director Brian Helgeland's cut of Payback was dismissed by distributors Paramount and Warner Bros., then heavily re-shot and re-tooled by Mel Gibson's production company, Icon Entertainment. Those reasons are explained in detail by Gibson, Helgeland, and others in the special features of Payback: The Director's Cut (Special Collector's Edition). Among them: Helgeland's version was too dark. America wasn't ready in 1999 to see Gibson play an unapologetic, 1970s-style antihero who might not get exactly what he wants. Audiences didn't have the patience to wait for answers to their story questions. A dog dies. (A big no-no.) All of these comments make sound, practical sense. But here's the bottom line: Helgeland's cut, perhaps even a bit more disciplined and taut (according to Payback’s editor, Kevin Stitt) than it was in 1999, is a serious movie with an organic tone and logic that makes the film look the way it was meant to look: as a neo-noir film for adults. The theatrical release of Payback, by contrast, was and is silly and vulgar, self-sabotaging, pointlessly vicious, and perversely jaunty. It is very much like–deliberately like–the Lethal Weapon series. The Director’s Cut makes clear that’s not at all what Helgeland had in mind.
Kudos to Gibson and Icon for giving Helgeland a chance to restore his film and get it out on this DVD. But a look at both versions (this disc does not include the theatrical cut) back-to-back can certainly make one's head spin. Icon’s revisions in the original release show little faith in a contemporary audience’s ability to discern much about a story or mood or character from spare but telling details. That film relies on crass swatches of voiceover narration, cute inserts, added scenes, and hipster tunes on the soundtrack. All of that was designed to tell an audience how to feel rather than encourage a cinematic experience encountered with an open heart and mind. Worst of all is a specious third act nakedly built around an obligatory Gibson-gets-tortured sequence, leading the film to a lazy, comforting conclusion. The Director’s Cut eschews all of that. Gibson’s character, Porter (based on the central character in the novel "The Hunter," written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark), is a man returning from the brink of death with nothing but his identity and the memory of something (an almost-nominal amount of money) taken from him. His iron determination, his capacity for brutality and inducing fear, and his survival instinct make him anything but warm and cuddly. It's his few ties to the past–especially an interrupted relationship with a call girl (Maria Bello)–that humanize him. One doesn't have to like Porter; one just accepts him and follows his journey in an honest, unmitigated fashion. That’s exactly what Helgeland does, and his cleaner, leaner, smarter cut is instantly rewarding for its uncompromising, undistracted toughness. Special features include a documentary about the film’s history, and a wonderful interview with Westlake.
The New Yorker's Review:Screenshots:
Every so often Mel Gibson likes to get down and dirty for one of his unglamorous roles; the last such occasion was "Ransom," and now he appears as Porter, a grim-faced criminal who was cheated of seventy thousand dollars by his wife (Deborah Kara Unger) and his associate (Gregg Henry). The movie, which delights in its low-lit scumminess, follows Porter on a quest to retrieve his money and, more broadly, to assert his determined free spirit. This entails the indifferent slaughter of those who stand in his way-men from the Outfit, for example, a mysterious cabal that holds their city in its clutches. The picture was filmed mostly in Chicago, although the place is never named, and the writer and director is Brian Helgeland, although he was ousted from the project before the end; reports are that almost a third of it was rewritten and reshot. No surprise, then, that the result should be a mess: half-jokey and dumbly violent, with performances that flail all over the place. (Special mention should go to the twitching of Gregg Henry's facial muscles.) The script was based on Richard Stark's novel "The Hunter," which was also the source of the 1967 Lee Marvin movie "Point Blank." If you're looking for an existential hero on a revenge kick, Marvin is still your man.