Hi Aki,
A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)
The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.
Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)
Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)
Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)
A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.
She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)
The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.
Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.
(25 April 2009)
No comments:
Post a Comment