Gibson returns to the director’s seat for the first time in a decade, and people seem willing to take notice. Comeback material like The Beaver or winking appearances in films like The Expendables 3 or Machete Kills fizzled thanks to further legal trouble, such as what went down in 2010 when he was investigated for abuse and racist comments aimed towards his ex-girlfriend.īut it’s been a few years since Gibson did something truly awful, and Hacksaw Ridge isn’t some small cameo appearance. Gibson dug himself deeper and deeper into controversies, and his reputation has never really been able to recover. Months before Apocalypto hit theaters, Gibson went on his infamous anti-semitic tirade after being pulled over by Malibu police and handed a DUI, and his comments - including statements like “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!” - rightfully disgusted people, who did not accept Gibson’s excuse that he had been drinking a bit too much that night. Appropriately enough, this sort of uncomplicated narrative structure with unique world-building aligns it most with another recent new action classic, Mad Max: Fury Road, whose there-and-back-again plot was a breath of fresh air amid the increasingly growing class of convoluted popcorn action movies.
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It’s more concerned with bolstering its straightforward nature with the universal theme of survival.Ĭo-screenwriter Farhad Safinia made clear as much when he said that he and Gibson “wanted to update the chase genre by, in fact, not updating it with technology or machinery but stripping it down to its most intense form, which is a man running for his life, and at the same time getting back to something that matters to him.”īut even with all its streamlined action, the movie never forgot to shade in vivid details that create a truly unique world on-screen. Gibson’s film doesn’t worry about selling the sort of rewritten hagiography that marred Braveheart or committing the didactic lecturing of The Passion of the Christ. What makes Apocalypto truly great is its deceptively simple plot. Along the way he witnesses the endemic warfare and corruption that has overrun his ancient civilization, and battles to get back to his beloved family at any cost. In the film, a peaceful Mayan villager named Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), his pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernández), and their young son Turtles Run (Carlos Emilio Báez) briefly try to escape attack from a rival tribe hiding in a cave works for a short time, but ultimately, Jaguar Paw is captured, enslaved, and taken to be sacrificed to the gods in a nearby city. It’s hard to separate the man from his art, but if critics are willing to give Hacksaw Ridge a fair shake, then they should also look back at his gloriously off-kilter previous directorial effort, 2006’s Apocalypto, deserves a second look.
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His new film, Hacksaw Ridge - about the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honor in World War II - is the latest in a long line of hopeful comebacks. Gibson’s knack for anti-semitic hate speech eventually turned him into a pariah, and ten years after he hit bottom, he’s still somewhat lost in the wilderness. At that moment Gibson was the biggest name in Hollywood … and then came the fall. He hit his creative apex with the 1995 historical epic Braveheart, which won him a Best Picture at the Oscars. He was introduced as the ruggedly charming Australian newcomer in George Miller’s original Mad Max film and then hit superstardom as the memorably insane expat in 1980s hits like Lethal Weapon and its sequels.
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Mel Gibson was once a cinematic force to be reckoned with.