MOVIE REVIEW
Gibson’s comeback gets down and dirty
DISREPUTE is Mel Gibson’s best friend in the down-and-dirty, here-we-go-again action flick Blood Father, which opens in East London tomorrow.
As a star, Gibson can’t drum up a faithful audience at the multiplexes these days – this film is already available to stream on iTunes, after virtually bypassing a Stateside release.
It remains to be seen whether the Gibson-directed World War 2 drama Hacksaw Ridge, well-reviewed in Venice, gets his behind-the-camera career more fully out of pariah jail.
Blood Father trades off Gibson’s leprous status by casting him as a just-paroled criminal who must protect his teen daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty) from Mexican drug-lords after she accidentally shot her scumbag boyfriend (Diego Luna) in the neck during a shake-down.
First up, we get Gibson’s John Link at his latest AA meeting, celebrating one sober year in the clink and one now he’s out.
“You can’t be a prick your whole life and then say never mind,” he tells us semi-repentantly in dialogue typical of this script, derived from Peter Craig’s pungent novel.
Link is trying his best – returning to his clapped-out trailer to scorch a few more tattoos on some locals’ biceps and basically keep his head down.
It’s funny, then, when he takes in the distraught Lydia, hears of recent events, and has to break all his parole conditions one by one when the Mexicans track her down. “There we go, aggravated assault,” he seethes after stabbing one in the hand.
As the pair flee both cops and assassins, Gibson’s growing rage becomes the catalyst for everything that works – his snarling frustration, which seems, shall we say, readily summoned, gives the film a musky but effective base note. It’s hardly a deep performance but it exerts a livid grip.
It is a crude flurry of face-offs interspersed with overcooked, oversalted banter that’s too tempting to tune out.
Mesrine’s Jean-François Richet directs it as if fulfilling a jailyard chore, and he’s overreliant on the supporting cast to keep our attention from drifting.
William H Macy, as Link’s putupon sponsor, is all hard-earned loyalty, and so welcome, but pops in and out; Michael Parks gets some speechy down-time as an old friend called Preacher, and Dale Dickey, the sharp-faced neighbour from Winter’s Bone, is part of the scenery as his wife. Blood Father wants badly for the fatherdaughter relationship – not a million miles from the one in The Wrestler – to count for more.
It needed a tougher actress and less clichéd writing about abandonment and redemption.
Still, in the grizzled spectacle Gibson willingly makes of himself, it has a Bmovie equivalent of that A-plus Mickey Rourke comeback, delivered with just enough clout to count as a step in the right direction.