BEFORE: The third film in a Mel Gibson triple-play, and I'm back on the crime beat.
THE PLOT: Porter is shot by his wife and best friend and is left to die. When he survives he plots revenge.
AFTER: I'm not going to pretend this film is some kind of ultimate action film - reading up on the trivia about it on IMDB, it appears that the original director, Brian Helgeland, was fired, two days after he won an Oscar for "L.A. Confidential". Another director was hired to do re-shoots, and due to Mel Gibson's schedule shooting "Lethal Weapon 4", this delayed the release of this film for a year.
If you read between the lines, the firing of the director means that something, somewhere, wasn't working. And the most likely culprit is the story - meaning that this film in its original form didn't make a whole lot of sense. Considering all this drama, it's kind of amazing that a semi-coherent film rose from the ashes of the original shoot. I'm checking out the original plotline now on Wikipedia, and the differences sort of make this the "Blade Runner" of action films - in that one version has a voice-over narration and the other doesn't. One is also semi-coherent and ends on an up note, and the other sounds like a complete mess and ends more bleakly. And still, there will always be a select group of people who will favor the Director's Cut.
I think the biggest hurdle to some people liking this is the fact that the hero doesn't act very heroic. He hurts a lot of people - they may deserve it, sure, but does that make it right? Besides, his motives are not always altruistic, seeing that he wants both his take from a robbery, plus of course revenge.
He's not so much a "good guy" as his is the "least bad guy" - and in that sense, Porter reminds me of The Punisher. Despite the mangling of Marvel's Punisher character in 3 films that range from terrible to O.K., he remains a odd character, a regular guy who lives in the superhero world, and who kills criminals while waging his one-man war on crime. The rightness or wrongness of his actions is very cloudy, and kind of depends on where you stand on rehabilitation and such. Certainly he's got his own set of morals, and your mileage may vary.
In the finale, there's something that I call an "editing cheat". The shots are organized in a way that gets us to expect a certain result, because of the rule of parallel editing (cross-cutting between two scenes or groups of characters implies that they will soon interact). However, then the two groups most defiantly do NOT intersect (this same cheat was famously used in "The Silence of the Lambs") and our expectations are defied. It's funny, parallel editing is sort of mis-named because parallel lines never interact - so maybe THIS should be called parallel editing, when the two different groups of characters do NOT collide with each other.
Also starring Gregg Henry (last seen in "United 93"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Kill Bill Vol. 2"), Maria Bello (last seen in "Permanent Midnight"), David Paymer (last seen in "Mighty Joe Young"), Bill Duke (last seen in "Bird on a Wire"), William Devane (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises"), Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), James Coburn (last seen in "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit"), John Glover (last seen in "The Incredible Shrinking Woman"), Deborah Kara Unger.
RATING: 5 out of 10 alligator bags
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