Thursday, 4 February 1999

PAYBACK SPOILERS

OK, spoiler fans. (and presumably Point Blank fans.) Let's start with the cast. I'm not bothering with movie names because almost all of them have been changed. So, Mel Gibson plays the Lee Marvin character. James Coburn plays the Carroll O'Connor character. William Devane plays the Lloyd Bochner character. Gregg Henry plays the John Vernon character. David Paymer plays the Michael Strong character. The Kris Kristofferson character isn't in Point Blank, except by name as the mysterious Fairfax, the top dog of the organization.

As for the women, they are no longer sisters. Maria Bello plays the Angie Dickinson character and Deborah Kara Unger plays the Susan Acker character.

The mirroring technique that Boorman used for his dream world is used all over Point Break, but the current version avoids giving it any meaning. The dream elements are gone. Gibson's character has his memory of the heist that went wrong in one dream sequence, but it has no significance except for filling out the story in what is now basically a flashback.

The frame-up, which Helgeland took from Get Carter, was used on the big boss in Get Carter, but is used against some police that he created as further hindrances in this movie. I would guess the cops were also adds, but I'd need to see the movie again to be sure. They do have the comedic tone that seems to mark the "new" footage and they do come into contact with the Asian gang, but they may have been there from the start.

The scenes of Walker getting in or out of the syndicate's hotel are not in this movie. Were they shot and deemed too slow? Did audiences get impatient with Mel's action being slowed to hiding behind posts in a parking lot? I don't know. But all slow pacing is now out. That includes the time the Parker/Walker character spends in O'Connor's/Coburn's home before the bad guys show.

The story with Fairfax's son, which is a kidnapping by Gibson and Bello, in a plot to draw Fairfax out, is brand new. Pointedly, Coburn is not in the scene where those bad guys get killed. He essentially disappears after Kristofferson shows up.

But the biggest change and the biggest spoiler is that Gibson lives at the end to drive off into the sunset with Bello. Duh! One of the great things about Point Blank is that it is a dream movie and that he is dead at the end. This is the second time one of Helgeland's screenplays was changed to bring Mel to life at the end. I have emblazoned on my memory the moment when Mel died in Conspiracy Theory, befitting the bittersweet tone of the film. Then, the world's stupidest return to life and the message in the saddle. Argh! This time, the entire dream element was dumped to make this a simple revenge story. Good guy wins. Bad guys lose. That wasn't really the point (so to speak) of doing this, was it? They turned film noir into a buddy film.

But again, I don't think this was just Mel's ego in play, but a very real problem with Helgeland's work in directing the noir. Good noir is not a gimme. And bad noir is amongst the worst crap you'll ever see on a screen. By the time you get to the end of this film, Gibson's having dreamt it all and being dead on the operating table would have been just as wrong. There was no good way to go, but there is a good reason to go if you love movies. This is exactly the kind of bad movie that you can sink your teeth into in an attempt to understand how movies are made and unmade.