In the very first moments of Payback, Mel Gibson's narration is directed largely into that subwoofer channel. As he speaks in a film noir-style voiceover, the sound rumbles inside your chest like the voice of God or Darth Vader. It's obviously a last-ditch effort to make Gibson sound like a bad-ass, because he looks like -- well, truth be told, he just looks like a movie star. If only he could have grown his hair out a little scruffier, grimied himself up a little more, he might have seemed more formidable. Instead, he's as cuddly a guy as you could hope to meet, which takes some of the edge off of his character.

Granted, there are some possibilities for contrasting Mel's Hollywood good looks with his character's pit-bull temperament, and they're investigated in passing in an early sequence that has Gibson picking pockets, stealing dollars from a blind man, and dining well on stolen credit cards. But when the movie starts having him act like Chow Yun-Fat, well, it's a stretch.

Now, I'm not talking about his looks just because I want to bust on Mel Gibson. Heck, I like Mel Gibson. The first two Mad Max flicks were a defining event of their era, and I even thought the first two Lethal Weapon films were aces as far as American action movies go. For the most part, I even like this newest flight of fancy, which asks us to believe that Mel Gibson can tussle with everyone from the Chinese mob to corrupt New York City cops and come out on top through the savvy application of both brains and brawn.

The story's based on The Hunter, an old book by pulp novelist Donald E. Westlake (writing pseudonymously), the same one that also inspired the 1967 Lee Marvin film Point Blank, directed by John Boorman. We're oriented storywise early on, via a flashback that shows Gibson's character, Porter, being betrayed by his friend Val -- and his wife -- after a $140,000 heist in Chinatown. Said "friend" splits with all of the money, leaving Porter to bleed to death on the floor. Instead, the bullets just make Porter mad. With a singlemindedness that would do Clint Eastwood proud, Porter sets out to collect what's due him -- his $70,000 share of the cash.

What ensues is a cheerfully comic and relatively violent thriller that sees Porter shooting his way up the food chain in an organization known only as "the outfit." The outfit, you see, accepted that $140,000 sum from Val as payment for money owed. Porter, then, wants it back on principle. On the way to confront Bronson (Kris Kristofferson), the outfit's equivalent of a CEO, Porter crosses paths with his junkie wife (Deborah Unger, who does her career no favors here), her weaselly dealer (David Paymer), Val's Asian dominatrix (Lucy Liu), and Porter's old pal Rosie (Maria Bello, quite good in a reprise of her Permanent Midnight performance). The bluer-than-blue cinematography by Ericson Core is an interesting choice for a contemporary crime drama, and the score by Chris Boardman sets the right pulpy tone.

Compared to the hard-as-nails American action pictures of the 1960s and 1970s (I'm thinking of stuff like Bullitt and The French Connection), Payback is kiddy time, with lots of attitude but nothing truly startling showing up on-screen. Still, the movie has an interesting effect on multiplex audiences. At my screening, an adult couple got up and made for the door during one especially brutal sequence. To my surprise, they stopped short of leaving the theater, and, just as Mel gave another one of the film's villains what was coming to him, they sat down again, in seats near the exit, to finish the film. It was as if something happening on-screen had crossed their own personal lines, and they were ready to evacuate in order to spare themselves any more abuse. But when they saw that Gibson was already back in the picture, popping a bullet into the bad guy, somehow it made everything A-OK. The key to this movie's box office prospects are right there in the title: Payback. Everyone just gets what's coming to them -- except Porter, of course. He may be a common thief, but he scores preferential treatment in the movie's universe because he's the movie star. In this way, the film itself is nearly as amoral as its lead character.

You may notice that I've concentrated on Gibson in this review, rather than screenwriter/director Brian Helgeland (he's best known for co-writing L.A. Confidential, but his credits also include the so-so Gibson vehicle Conspiracy Theory). That's because Gibson apparently wrested control of the movie from Helgeland at the last minute, concerned about how it would play in Peoria. Reports from test screenings indicate that the final third of the movie was rewritten and reshot to Gibson's specifications -- as a matter of fact, Kristofferson's character never appeared in Helgeland's original cut of the film, which had a far more downbeat ending. I don't mean to suggest that the released version is a train wreck on the order of Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes (another Paramount film that went under the knife at the last minute). Payback is funny and entertaining all the way through. The final reel is terribly anticlimactic, however, leaving you with the feeling that, in an uncompromised state, this could have been unsettling and even affecting little film. As it stands, it's an agreeable popcorn-muncher and little more, oblivious to its own darker undercurrents.