Festive turkey’s in poor taste
ONE of this week’s new film releases proves either that anyone can return from movie industry exile, or that starring in a clunky Christmas turkey is a new way to punish Mel Gibson for his past behaviour.
In Daddy’s Home 2, he plays a tough, inappropriate, sweary grandfather, who joins a blended family of parents and stepparents for the holidays.
‘It looks as if he’s been chiselled from Gibraltar itself,’ gasps Will Ferrell when the 61-year-old Mad Max star shows up onscreen. Too right, because although the movie plays Mel for laughs, actual rocks would have been funnier.
‘Hey, kids, I’ve got one for you,’ he tells his grandchildren. ‘Two dead hookers wash up on the shore...’
This is the Braveheart star’s first family comedy in more than a decade, following his infamous 2006 drink-driving arrest and anti-Semitic rant, and the tape of hateful tirades against a former girlfriend that was released four years later. It doesn’t help that Mel’s character, a retired astronaut, is contrasted with more sensitive dads as a man’s man with ladies falling at his feet.
As the film industry wakes up to its own bad behaviour, Daddy’s Home 2 feels like a movie from another age, when heartlessness and violence were cool guy qualities even in a film about father figures, while being compassionate and gentle is for weak, effeminate losers.