Payback (1999) *

Directed by Brian Helgeland. With Mel Gibson, Maria Bello and Deborah Kara Unger. An extremely unpleasant black comedy about a sadistic gangster (Gibson) fighting against an entire crime syndicate. The main motif of this picture is pain: every human interaction involves either a whipping, a gunshot, a bite, a smack, an explosion, or some other form of severe bodily harm. It's clearly meant to be funny, but it provokes about as much hilarity as a root canal without anaesthesia.