Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection I decided to do something new. Two movies based on the same source material.

The book in question is “The Hunter” the first of Donald E. Westlake’s “Parker” novels, written under the penname Richard Stark. Parker, one of the quintessential anti-heroes in pulp literature, is a brutal methodical and thoroughly professional criminal and “The Hunter” tells the story of the roaring rampage of revenge he takes when he is betrayed by his wife and partner.

So far there have been three films based on the book; although Westlake never allowed the name Parker to be used in any of the movies in his lifetime. Also, for the record, I haven’t actually read the book, but I’m a huge fan of Darwyn Cook’s extremely thorough graphic novel adaption.

The first of the two movies is John Boorman’s Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as “Walker”. Boorman uses the book as an outline, taking quite a few liberties with the plot. But that doesn’t matter, what is left is like a fine brandy – boiled down to just the key elements. Lee Marvin turns up his trademark intensity to 11 as he hunts down his betrayers and then goes after their bosses in order to get back the money that was stolen from him.

Boorman does some incredible work, the pacing is fast and lyrical in ways that make things seem even more intense that they actually are. My only real problem with it was a weird use of overlaying flashbacks best described as ‘trippy’. One critic’s theory is that the flashbacks made it feel as if the whole film was Walker’s revenge fantasy while he was dying of his wounds from the initial betrayal.

The second movie was Brian Helgeland’s Payback, starring Mel Gibson as “Porter”. I had put off seeing it ever since I saw a commercial for it, but it was through this movie I first ever heard of Parker. Payback came out about the time that the Lethal Weapon franchise had degenerated into a buddy cop comedy series, the commercial seemed to suggest that Payback would be putting Mel Gibson through more of the same by emphasizing that the amount of money Porter wanted (straight from the book, uncorrected for inflation) was a ridiculously low amount for all of the effort Porter was putting into his revenge. It didn’t help that what few snippets of the film I had seen were from some of the relatively comic scenes from the book. When I finally got around to seeing the film this week I went with the director’s cut.

It turned out to be nothing like my assumptions, and, other than an updating of the story from the early sixties to the late nineties, and a few embellishments involving some crooked cops, and a triad gang led by Lucy Liu, it was actually a lot closer to the book than Point Blank and a LOT more brutal. However, it seemed to lack the focus that the book and the previous film had. It was almost as if they wanted to make Porter more vulnerable and more of an everyman, despite being a crook and a murderer, instead of the original unstoppable Parker from the book whose only redeeming feature is his professional code.