MEL’S STILL THE DADDY!
He’s had his demons off screen, so who better than Mel Gibson to play a recovering alcoholic going on the run to protect his daughter?
Here is a tale of two novels adapted for the big screen. One was a spectacular global bestseller, the other wasn’t. One has been turned into a highly entertaining thriller, the other hasn’t. That it is the much more successful book, The Girl On The Train, that has become the far less successful film, doubtless says something about expectation, as well as the inconvenience for the director of a psychological thriller of millions of people already knowing the ending.
But there is another reason why Peter Craig’s book Blood Father has yielded a much better movie, co-written by Craig himself, than Paula Hawkins’s The Girl On The Train. It is a simpler, more cinematic story, less dependant on directorial wiles than on strong acting and decent writing, both of which it has in spades.
Mel Gibson is the star, not that he looks much like one. With an unkempt grey beard, his face as lined as a map of Greyhound bus routes, Gibson plays John Link, a former convict and recovering alcoholic, holed up in a remote trailer park, scratching a living as a tattoo artist.
It could be that Link has grappled with even more demons than Gibson, which is saying plenty. But for the improbably perfect set of Hollywood teeth, he looks like a man who has gone ten rounds with life, and lost on a knockout.
He has no direction and no purpose, except to keep on the right side of his parole officer and off the booze. This he manages with the help of his neighbour and Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, Kirby (William H. Macy).
Link has to shrug off his existential torpor when he gets a call from his long-estranged only daughter, Lydia (erin Moriarty), begging his help.
Until then he didn’t even know that she was still alive, although we did, because we’d already seen her mixed up with some very rotten apples indeed, drug runners led by her amoral boyfriend Jonah (Diego Luna).
Lydia has accidentally shot Jonah, which means there is a price on her head and a nasty gang looking for her, not to mention a sinister enforcer for a Mexican drugs cartel.
Link knows he’s a cartel man because he recognises the tattoos. He can read a tattoo at 50 paces. It’s that kind of film.
But if you overlook the corniness, it is proper, high-octane, thrilling stuff, as father and daughter go on the run from the gangsters and, the least of their problems, the police.
This requires Link to jump on to a motorbike, kick his inner alpha-male into gear, and become even badder than the baddies, which he does so effortlessly that my wife, alongside me at the screening, whispered: ‘He makes Liam Neeson look a wimp.’
She was exaggerating, as you are allowed to do in a cinema whisper. A herd of marauding rhinos couldn’t make Neeson look wimpish, but undoubtedly there are echoes of the Taken films starring Neeson, and of the TV drama Breaking Bad.
Moreover, Craig (who is the son of actress Sally Field) has made a fine job of the screenplay. The dialogue is witty without ever being glib, and sufficiently realistic to obscure the story’s sundry improbabilities. There are even a few shafts of real poignancy in the underlying themes of filial love and parental responsibility.
And it’s good to be reminded that Gibson, for all his flaws as a human being, really can act.
SO CAN emily Blunt, who, as you are probably aware by now, takes the title role in The Girl On The Train.
It was a casting decision that seemed to upset the book’s legions of fans, since rachel on the page is raddled and overweight, and many also objected to the geographical shift from London to upstate New York.
I don’t think either matters, unduly. Since I reviewed the film in Tuesday’s paper I have seen it again and Blunt certainly gives a strong performance as a woman saturated in alcohol and self-pity, whose dismissal from her job does not stop her keeping up appearances by commuting every day to and from Manhattan.
It is on these daily train journeys that she becomes obsessed with a couple whose house backs on to the railway tracks. They are Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke evans), near neighbours of rachel’s former husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife Anna (rebecca Ferguson).
Then Megan goes missing, shortly after rachel spotted her canoodling with a
man who wasn’t Scott. Could Rachel have something to do with Megan’s disappearance?
She is too pickled to remember even what she had for breakfast, so she’s not sure and nor are we, unless we have read the book. Perhaps because he knew he was making a 15-million-peoplealready-know whodunit, director Tate Taylor doesn’t seem too bothered about cranking up the suspense. But the mystery still needs solving, which slowly, achingly slowly, it is, in part by the time-honoured (or if you prefer, hackneyed) device of flitting back and forth in time.
Unfortunately, long before a histrionic denouement, which if nothing else will make you never look at a corkscrew in quite the same way again, the film has come off the rails.
Actually, the overwhelming problem is not the widespread familiarity with the novel. After all, not everyone has read it.
No, it has more to do with misanthropy; there is nobody in this story you feel like rooting for. The men are oversexed and brutish, the women messed up and shallow. Not even the detective, played by Allison Janney, is remotely likeable.
None of that matters in print, because we get to know them all so well.
But on screen there has to be at least one protagonist you really care about. Blood Father has two of them; The Girl On The Train has none.