Metacritic reviews

Helgeland's film positively seethes with bad vibrations; it's kicky, nasty urban sangfroid with pointy little teeth and a serious case of the angries, an existential hand grenade disguised as a heist film.

While there's quite a bit more graphic bloodshed and brutality here than in any of the late screen icon's vehicles, Payback is a worthy '90s successor to his kind of movie.

Helgeland makes a solid debut as director here, finding a new angle through which to view the Parker character, and doing so without exhausting the possibilities.

Payback is a thriller so mean and degraded it carries a low-down, vicious charge. Sadism is its only real subject, and its only real life as well.

Helgeland strips the material back to its pulp origins and overlays it with a patina of glib motifs familiar to devotees of Hollywood’s 1970s renaissance.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

In the last third, Payback turns into a joke.

Has the makings of that rarest of ventures, an adaptation that is true to the spirit of the original as well as its own time and place. But as Payback wends its way toward its conclusion, its promise dissipates and its pleasures wane.

The comic timing and Gibson's mugging are skillful, but the movie fulfills expectations of plot twists and ironic atmosphere only after having made clear that it won't be offering much else.

An interesting cast is wasted in this misanthropic thriller.