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Apocalypto December 19, 2006 |
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Over the summer, you may recall, Mel Gibson went a little nuts in a boozy rant in Beverly Hills, accosting two police officers, spouting some choice racist epithets, and sullying whatever leftover charisma he still had unused from his days as a top box office draw, before he made that insanely bloody Jesus film a few years back which made him both exceedingly wealthy and, to most normal moviegoers, a bit of a religious kook. Half a year later, after a few awkward television apologies and much debate about whether he could reasonably make a comeback in a Hollywood run by the people he most offended, Gibson has resurfaced with his latest project, a crazy little jungle epic called “Apocalypto” that thankfully has little to do with religious fanaticism and gets back to the director’s “Braveheart” roots of directing riveting action scenes while presenting a story arch that is both disturbing and harrowing. I don’t know if Gibson can yet be forgiven for that drunken tirade (though I can still enjoy “Lethal Weapon” and “Maverick” just as much as I can still enjoy fellow ranter Michael Richards on the “Seinfeld” DVD’s), but the question of whether as a filmmaker he can get over the shame of it appears to be answered with this film, which is arguably the best thing he’s attached his name to in the entire decade. Like “Braveheart” it is a film filled with violent battles and breathtaking location photography, shot primarily in the unforgiving rainforests of Latin America, but instead of telling a singular story of Kings, rebels, and proletariat freedom, “Apocalypto” tells a universal story of invasion, struggle, and survival, and how one resourceful warrior fights to save his family when outside forces destroy his village, massacre his people, and disrupt the general way of being he has known it his entire life. The description alone makes it sound like a film leaking with current metaphors, and of course you can draw the conclusion that the Mayan empire depicted here, with its brutal outside warriors completely destroying, uninvited, village upon village of innocent farmers and hunters, is just a riff on the situation in Iraq (though thankfully the leader of the bad guys isn’t named Chief Hungry Bush), but I don’t want to focus on the political symbolism of the film, we’ll let right wing wags deal with that on the internet, for all we need to know about the film is that Gibson’s vision as a director is still first rate, and this film, though at times unflinchingly violent, is a doozy of an action yarn. Set somewhere in Mesoamerica during the 8-10th century (or 16th if we can classify the story as Aztec rather than Mayan, which is hard to do), “Apocalypto” tells a deceptively simple story of old school survival-on-the-run. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is a young hunter with a budding family and a happy life of gathering food with his father and friends, but one day his village is brutally attacked by outside forces and, after stowing his pregnant wife and child in a cave, he’s taken by chain gang to a stone pyramid where sacrifices are being made to the Gods for better crops and prosperity. He is saved, temporarily, when a solar eclipse occurs just as the chief voodoo practitioner is about to cut his heart out, literally, and send his decapitated dome down the pyramid steps, and after a harrowing escape from a gauntlet style arena challenge (skewering more towards “The Most Dangerous Game” than “Survivor”), he is hunted ravenously by five or six warriors who, fearing an early prophesy about a “man jaguar” sending them all to their ends, wish the scarily resourceful man dead for good. This is where the film really picks up speed, as a foot chase commences through the jungle, over the river rapids, down a huge waterfall, and ending, after some grizzly deaths, back at the scene of the original invasion, where our hero has to survive long enough to save his wife and child from a rapidly flooding cave. If the early hunting scenes of the film seemed kind of slow, and the lengthy sacrifice sequence seemed exceedingly violent and disgusting, this third act foot chase is the perfect leveler of the first two difficult acts, a masterpiece of action filmmaking that never relents as Jaguar Paw frantically runs and runs from his pursuers, stopping only for life-or-death confrontation and to gather a quick breath, something he, and us, are hardly allowed in this brilliant concluding third. With stunning jungle photography, a real find in non-professional Youngblood, whose kind features and heroism convince us to root for him the way we did Gibson’s William Wallace in “Braveheart”, and a kind of reckless attitude toward the boundaries of screen violence (with the Disney seal of approval no less), “Apocalypto” is Grade A action jungle filmmaking in the tradition of “Apocalypse Now” and “Predator”, and though its embattled director may still have some personal issues to deal with, for now, the film is all that matters, and it’s a good one. “Apocalypto” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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