Thou Shalt Not Kill: HACKSAW RIDGE

Hacksaw Ridge is a war film about a man who refused to take up a weapon. It’s a true story of a World War II soldier who saw the world tearing itself apart and felt called to help put it back together. He volunteered as a medic, determined to save life while everyone around him was taking it. Alas, this doesn’t sit well with his commanding officers, who eventually force him into a court martial during his time at basic training. He refuses to even touch a weapon. They say he’s disobeying orders. He says he’s following his conscience. This is a fine setup for moral dramaturgy, and an intriguing challenge to Truffaut’s insistence that any anti-war film would, by presenting its subject matter, be inescapably exciting. That the director here is Mel Gibson adds another wrinkle. Here is a filmmaker who creates displays of hyperbolic violence, transforming stories of rebellion into gory sacrifice (Braveheart), stories of religious uplift into contemplations of flayed flesh (The Passion of the Christ), and whose clear masterpiece is an all-out, non-stop action splatter (Apocalypto) with violence and brutality as its subject rather than its conduit. His latest is his most self-conscious about cutting against the grain of his usual preoccupations while upholding his every interest.

It’s an old-fashioned movie, a widescreen, serious, straight-faced, unironic, conventional, period piece about strong, silent, and noble suffering. We see the young man (Andrew Garfield, playing humble aw-shucks simple sturdiness) in his small-town youth, smitten with a pretty nurse (Teresa Palmer). He shows up to donate blood just to get the opportunity to talk to her. Here we are right off the bat with an eye on plasma and its loss, willing or otherwise. There’s also the man’s tearful drunk brute father (Hugo Weaving), a struggling World War I vet with clear psychological scars from his deployment. He weeps near the graves of his fallen comrades, at one point dramatically smashing his booze bottle on a headstone, his blood artfully dripping across the top of the smooth white stone. Gibson’s not shy about drawing these connections with obvious and emphatic splashes. When an early childhood tableau of brothers fighting escalates to one tween swinging at the other with a brick, he draws the camera close to the impact, hears the sick thunk, but then follows the boy into the house where he stares at religious iconography on the wall. The birth of a pacifist is there, as well as an intermingling of guilt and duty, spirituality and conviction.  

By the time we get to boot camp, the movie becomes broad cliché, introducing a bullying commander (Vince Vaughn) slinging out nicknames to a stock group of platoon movie types: the southerner, the pretty boy, the Italian-American, and so forth. They don’t emerge as characters so much as people we can vaguely recognize once the soldiers end up on the battlefield. They don’t look kindly on their medic, who insists he won’t be using a gun, even in self-defense or in protection of his fellow soldiers. They beat him, but he won’t break. He’s jailed, but he won’t back down. He’s court martialed, and still insists he be allowed to help on his terms. He wants to heal, not hurt. Eventually he gets his wish, and Gibson doesn’t do much to milk the suspense of the court proceedings. Instead, he’s eager to follow the men to war, staging a lengthy and overwhelming battle sequence with buckets of gore chased with awe for its man of anti-violence behaving so heroically while still maintaining his ideological purity. The movie’s quaint sturdiness is unmistakably Gibson’s, with a religious fervor and belief in the power of bloody movies sitting side by side.

The movie’s grand finale, an extended and overwhelming work of blood-and-guts filmmaking, is a battle to take a ridge on an island in the Pacific. It earns the name Hacksaw through its waves of soldiers mowed down on both sides of the fight. And through it all, armed only with a spirit of decency and a desire to help, the medic sets about helping. Gibson surrounds him with meat-grinder battle scenes: dripping wounds, cacophonous ammunition, fog of war dirt and grime, loose limbs, arterial spray, demolished faces, gutted corpses, rot and rats, mud and muck, clouds of organs and tissue. And yet Gibson doesn’t simply focus on the horror, but pulls attention to the man refusing to participate. He ducks for cover, darts out with gauze and morphine, eager to get foxhole to foxhole to better save lives. There’s clear admiration here, and through the film’s earnest broad passion for the story, there’s something quietly moving within the surrounding bombast. Garfield wears a bewildered expression of simple duty, head down, hard at work.

In one pivotal moment, when danger is closest, he picks up a rifle. I tensed, wondering if Gibson would give in to his goriest blood lust. Instead, the man simply needed it to help drag a wounded soldier to safety. He sticks to his principles and the movie respects that. Although the movie is too often lumpy in construction or heavy-handed in its message, it represents a refreshing and ennobling concern for dissent in the face of wrongheaded assumptions, and the radical idea of peace in a time of war. The soldier who wishes only to heal and not to hurt is treated as aberrant, allowing him on the battlefield seen as punishment. And yet as he helps the people cut down by senseless bloodshed, he becomes their hero. He lived in dark times, and was called to be a light. We live in dark times. A movie like this, however imperfect, is a welcome reminder to be the light where you can, in all the ways you can, for all the people you can.

Needs Sharpening: MACHETE KILLS

With Robert Rodriguez, there’s never a question of authenticity in his pulpy prefabricated cult films. He’s a filmmaker following his passions and interests, which largely sit squarely within a desire to reconstitute comic books, B-movies, and exploitation pictures in a variety of partially-postmodern configurations. At his best, he doesn’t just borrow from iconic and disreputable genre ideas and finds a way to create some honest iconic moments of his own, images that stick in the brain long after context starts to fade. I’m thinking of the opening rival-spies-in-love montage of Spy Kids (his greatest), Johnny Depp’s bleeding eyes partially hidden behind sunglasses in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Laura Harris soon to stalk out of the skin she’s showing off to reveal her otherworldliness in The Faculty. His best movies are movie movies, pure playful pleasure.

That’s what made Machete, the 2010 expansion of a spoof trailer from his Grindhouse collaboration with Tarantino, enjoyable. Its clever blend of button-pushing political commentary and bloody Tex-Mexploitation action swirled around a stoic performance from craggy tough guy character actor Danny Trejo as the eponymous ex-federale defender and protector of underdogs everywhere. The movie was knowing without being too knowing, laugh-out-loud exciting, not because of faux-shoddiness, but through sheer force of earnest silliness. You could never accuse Rodriguez of being above cartoony violent gags. I still smile when I recall the sequence that found a baddie stabbed with a meat thermometer, a funny enough moment that becomes even better when the building explodes and the man’s corpse flies into frame, the thermometer still in place, now reading “Well Done.”

Rodriguez is always having fun. The question is whether the audience gets to have the fun with him. In the case of Machete Kills, there’s not a single moment as enjoyable or memorable as what happened to that meat thermometer. It’s a movie that’s content to run its gory gags into the ground. I mean, you’ve seen one guy get sucked up into the propellers of a helicopter or boat engine, you’ve seen them all. One is a shock. A dozen is quite literally overkill. The deliberately silly sequel finds Machete recruited by the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen, credited here under his birth name, Carlos Estevez) to track down Mendez (Demian Bichir), a Mexican madman. This mastermind wants the U.S.A. to invade Mexico with the goal of cleaning up the drug cartels and thinks threatening to launch a missile towards Washington D.C. will help make up the President’s mind. Not while Machete is an option.

The convoluted plot soon involves a motley and intriguing cast made up of Oscar winners and nominees, disgraced celebrities, a sitcom actress, former child actors, and a pop star. Amber Heard plays Miss San Antonio, who is secretly a federal agent assigned to be Machete’s handler on this mission. On his way to find Mendez, he runs across a brothel filled with militant prostitutes (led by Alexa Vega, a dozen years ago a co-star of Spy Kids) under the direction of a madam (Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara) who takes the term maneater uncomfortably literally. Her daughter (Vanessa Hudgens) supposedly knows how to find Mendez. Complications arise, and soon a string of assassins (killer cameos for Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Antonio Banderas, and Lady Gaga) and a villainous weapons tycoon (Mel Gibson) want a piece of Machete too. Eventually Michelle Rodriguez, returning from the first film with her army of underground justice-seeking Mexicans, rolls into the picture as well.

It’s all fairly self-involved as it largely ditches the sociopolitical digs of the first film for adolescent snickering, repeating gags over and over with diminishing returns and otherwise overstaying its welcome. The balance is all off, running through CGI viscera repetitively splattered, twisting around without much momentum, and picking up a nasty habit of offing its female characters with little thought the instant the plot is done with them. This is a movie that thinks a machine gun bra is the height of humor and then proceeds to go no further. It’s worth a smirk, but not much else, especially when the whole movie plays out like one half-baked idea after the next. I bet screenwriter Kyle Ward (working from a story from Rodriguez) thought they seemed funny at the time.

And yet, as exasperating and only fleetingly entertaining as I found Machete Kills, Trejo doesn’t overplay his hand. Machete remains a great pulpy character, tough and no-nonsense, ready to get the job done. Even as the film grows unsatisfying around him, he’s a steady presence that keeps things from falling apart entirely. The movie doesn’t end so much as stop, a series of faux-advertisements promising that Machete will return in Machete Kills Again…In Space! These clips from an as-yet-unmade film, a groovy sci-fi shoot-‘em-up with late-70’s Roger Corman-style effects, are the best part of the very real movie you have to sit through to see them. Now that looks like fun. Maybe Machete Kills is too much of the same thing. I’m ready to launch with Trejo and Rodriguez into the stratosphere and they’re stuck retreading the same old ground.

Radical Therapy: THE BEAVER

The Beaver is a film with good ideas, good performances, and good effort, but it doesn’t add up to a good movie. It’s nearly there, but not quite. I enjoyed each individual piece, to a point, but there’s a sense that with just a bit more prodding, with a push just a bit farther, the whole could be much more than good. It could even be great. Instead, we’re stuck nearly there. We can see greatness from here even if we can’t quite reach it.

In the film Mel Gibson plays Walter Black, a deeply depressed and alcoholic executive of a failing toy company. When we first see him, he’s presented as a man who once was a huge success but has had his professional reputation and personal relationships crippled by his mental illness. Because of the resonances with Gibson’s personal life that have left him an incredibly unpopular figure – his alcoholism, his abusiveness, his signs of mental illness – this dark comedy gets off too a painfully realistic start. Walter’s wife (Jodie Foster) and two sons, one a moody teenager (Anton Yelchin), the other a precocious grade-schooler (Riley Thomas Stewart), are starting to think he won’t get better. He spends all of his spare time, and most of his workday, sleeping when he’s not trudging along barely alert.

After a bungled suicide attempt, Walter finds himself talking through a beaver puppet that he pulled out of a dumpster. The beaver talks to him, encourages him, and gets him back to a state of confidence and alertness that his family and his colleagues find surprising in its speed and its apparent insanity. Walter walks through life a new man, almost literally. He wears the puppet on his hand at all times, speaking through it and for it in a thick brogue. It’s a complicated dance of identity and neurosis.

Gibson is playing two characters that are also two aspects of one character. It’s tricky territory, at once darkly funny and bleakly emotional, but Gibson pulls it off in a truly good performance. It’s not easy, but its power comes not just from its novelty or level of difficulty. This is some fine acting. Also quite good is the supporting cast that surrounds the central joke and dysfunction of the film. Foster (who also directs) is nicely rattled yet hopeful about it all and little Riley Thomas Stewart is awfully cute.

Meanwhile, Yelchin gets a fairly meaty subplot featuring a romance with a fellow high-schooler played by Jennifer Lawrence. So good in last year’s Winter’s Bone, Lawrence plays her character with a wounded fragility covered up by her cheerleader valedictorian status. She and Yelchin have an easy, unforced chemistry. Unfortunately, their story is neither fleshed out enough to be a compelling subplot nor satisfying enough to be merely a sweet footnote. They’re good enough to deserve a movie all their own.

The movie is swamped by the story of Walter Black. All else fades into the background, much like the presence of Gibson has distracted press from the actual movie itself. Walter sets the tone of it all, a dark, depressive sadness that leeches through its outer covering of quirk. Kyle Killen’s screenplay takes strange turns and is loaded up with obvious symbolism (sticky-notes listing similarities between two characters, a hole in the wall, a memory box, a paper-mache brain) and overly explanatory emotional reveals which have characters just flat out speaking their feelings in improbably ways. Foster’s solid direction holds things together, but the film ultimately doesn’t add up. There was so much to like about what was on screen that I almost couldn’t believe it when the credits rolled and I felt the whole thing come up empty.

Living on the EDGE OF DARKNESS

For a knee-jerk reactionary vigilante thriller, Edge of Darkness is surprisingly restrained with a long, slow burn of a mystery capped with swift brutal vengeance doled out in efficient action beats. It often follows a traditional structure for this type of movie, but it’s still shockingly satisfying even if we’ve more or less been here before.

At the film’s opening a corpse bubbles up to the surface of a lake with an ominous factory in the background. We return to this event later, but for the time being we are introduced to a grizzled Boston detective played by Mel Gibson. Whatever you think of his personal behavior (his drunken anti-Semitic rant is rightly a permanent smudge on his reputation) he has a compelling screen presence. He’s not a great actor, necessarily, but he has a force that draws attention and sympathy. In the opening moments of the film, his character is meeting his twenty-something daughter (Bojana Novakovic) who is returning home during time off from the nuclear facility at which she works. Just when we get our bearings she’s gunned down on the front porch, just minutes into the film. The act of violence is shocking in its force and gore, the shot flinging her back through the door with blood splattering the doorframe and staining the rug. But, as we are told, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, especially in the kind of movie in which the bereaved father has access to all the tools of a professional detective.

Probing the mystery of his daughter’s murder, Gibson visits her place of work, which brings us to the ominous factory of the opening shot. There he meets her boss, a slimy executive played by the great Danny Huston. Although he’s clearly the villain from the minute he walks on screen, Huston plays it so well, so coolly, that the point isn’t “how’d or why’d he do it?”, but “when will he be taken down?” Along the way, there are plenty of other slimeballs propped up as fodder for the vengeance machine, including an infuriating senator (Damian Young) and a shadowy suit (Denis O’Hare). There’s also a wild card whose allegiances may or may not be slippery; he’s played by the always welcome Ray Winstone who brings a performance filled with perfect shades of gray.

Gibson’s search for the truth is entertainingly handled, with this slick, professional production smoothly turning the gears of the plot. By the time the big reveals occur, the sensation of bloody justice feels earned. It is always a little queasy to have a movie so thoroughly work up the blood lust, coaxing dark feelings of violence out of the audience, but this movie, despite its sometimes squishy gunshots, doesn’t linger on injury in unseemly ways, nor does it go out of its way to glamorize the violence. This is a tight thriller with sharp blasts of satisfying revenge. Director Martin Campbell, adapting a 1980's miniseries that he directed, does a capable job of managing tone and expectations. The movie held my interest all the way through. I cared about Gibson’s quest for revenge and, yes, I felt a rush of adrenaline every time he moved closer to his ultimate goal. This is a smoothly enjoyable piece of popcorn filmmaking, a dependable, if ultimately slight, piece of entertainment.