Payback - The Director's Cut (Special Collector's Edition)

Product Description Mel Gibson, Maria Bello. Get ready to root for the bad guy when a routine heist turns into a double-cross and one man's left for dead. When he survives, he goes up against the mob, the Chinese Mafia, corrupt cops, a sniveling crook, and one big bad crime boss for his share of the take. Brian Helgeland's darker, noirish version of the 1999 original, itself a remake of Point Blank (1967), which was adapted from the novel The Hunter." 2007/color/90 min/NR. Amazon.com 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 ex