Payback

A sadistic burlesque of bone-crunching vengeance, this pulpy crime picture is adapted from the same Donald Westlake novel that inspired the icy, alienated Point Blank. But no-one will ever confuse the two. A mean-spirited cartoon beneath a thin veneer of faux-grit, screenwriter Brian Helgeland's feature debut is aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator: Fans of violent thrills who don't care about plot or character or plausibility or anything, really, except blood and bullets. Our anti-hero (heavy on the anti) is Porter (Mel Gibson), a harshly professional thief who plots a heist with his wife Lynn (Deborah Kara Unger) and sometime associate Va...