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Rage monster Mel Gibson is proving to audiences that he still has that maverick edge. While unmedicated antics continue in his private life, the actor can still make for an appealing good-spirited criminal. Get the Gringo, a grit-in-the-teeth production inspired by the sliced cheese and sleaze of early '70s action flicks, is the proof.
Sidestepping theaters in the United States, Gibson’s latest offering, Get the Gringo, revels in its bi-polarizing spirit of a judicial system gone comically wrong. It is a movie that is somehow both dismissible and strangely appealing with its visual energy and location. It is also unique in its semi-comic tone and uber violent vision of the most notorious prison in Mexico (the now closed El Pueblito).
To be clear, Get the Gringo is not a pretty picture. Heat practically bakes through the screen. It’s tough as nails realism and blood-fueled comic commotions will certainly turn a few heads. It’s a fit for its star, though. These days Gibson, also co-producer and co-writer of the film, is all about the grunge.
Directed by Adrian Grunberg (in his debut), Get the Gringo kicks off the hard-nosed attitude with a high speed chase that sees Gibson in a clown costume trying to outrun some federal agents as he nears the border. Hysterically telling isn’t it? His car is full of cash. His partner, also in clown-face, is spitting up blood in the backseat and Gibson, knowing the agents are close behind, angles the car toward the metal fence of the border and guns it.
The other side is no better.
The Federales decide to keep his stolen cash and throw him in the pungently over-crowded El Pueblito, where a whole culture of thieves and families are permitted to wander freely. Gibson, who remains unnamed throughout, quickly establishes his swagger with some well-executed take downs and is left alone. Even in prison Gibson can alienate himself.
Things get tricky when he befriends a cigarette smoking 10-year-old boy (Kevin Hernandez) who resides in the open-aired prison with his mother (Dolores Heredia). Gibson quickly learns the boy, like himself, has some serious anger issues. He wants revenge on the man who killed his father, but that man happens to be the one who “rules” the prison (Daniel Gimenez Cacho).
While Grunberg struggles a bit with the intensified antics of a free-wheeling ending, he peppers the movie with enough involving moments of black humor and violence to keep the audience’s attention. Sometimes the comedy rises from out of nowhere, but each occurrence adds a bit more flavor to Gibson’s script. Gibson himself provides a few lighthearted moments with some narration that reads as both ironic and, at times, light-hearted in spite of the amount of violent images happening around his character.
Yet, it’s the setting and production design from Bernardo Trujillo, who transformed a vacant penitentiary into an open market buffet of goods and wares and tattoos, which sells the film. That and the overwhelming amount of extras and villains, all cast for their memorable looks it seems. Yes, the bad guys gobble up their roles and, of course, Gibson saves what’s left of the day he’s already ruined, but it’s a brisk 95 minutes of grimy predictability that you won’t mind.
Get the Gringo might draw inspiration from the famous films of Leone, Hill, and Peckinpah, but there’s no real comparison; Grunberg sometimes falls into their footsteps instead of making his own. That being said, Get the Gringo is more tantalizing than Edge of Darkness and much more satisfying than The Beaver.
One thing is for certain, Mel Gibson will not go softly into that dark night.
MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some drug use and sexual material
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