Aubrey MaloneBlood Father (15A)
Take a dash of Elmore Leonard. Sprinkle in a tablespoon of Clint Eastwood. Stir some blood and guts from the Coen Brothers. Place in microwave and allow to heat. Serve with generous garnish of noir humour.
This would-be redemptive tale of reconciliation between an alcoholic ex-convict (Me Gibson) and his missing daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty) has all the ingredients of a first-class movie. The script is laced with catchy oneliners, the action is thrill-a-minute and the climax the stuff of a cowboy film set in Monument Valley.
The acting, though, lets it down. And the direction reminds you of hackneyed yellowpack fare from bad TV .
Gibson is off the sauce. The fact that he remains so throughout the 90 minutes of hell he endures here is a minor miracle. When he first encounters, Moriarty it’s after she’s killed (or so she thinks) her boyfriend when he tries to frame her on a drugs rap.
Their time together is brief. Trouble comes a-calling in the form of three ne’er-do-wells who want to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Clearly, it’s time for Dad and his little girl to move house – or what’s left of it.
When they go on the run Erin tells Mel a little about what she’s been up to (mostly bad stuff) since she went AWOL. You feel someone like Juliette Lewis – or, in the modern era, Evan Rachel Wood – could have done the part more credibly than Moriarty. She’s too casual about her walks on the wild side. It all just seems like a bit of fun to her even as people are losing their limbs. We needed her to be more hysterical so we could get into the movie more.
Gibson could also have phoned in his performance. This is very much Mad Max on Xanex. (He listens to her chaos almost with sang froid.)Gibson gets a lot of great lines to speak in the film but most of them he throws away, wasting whatever sweetness he once had on the desert air.
Entertaining
This is a Friday night ‘date’ movie – at least if your date is somebody desensitised to violence and expletives. It’s trash but entertaining trash, a soap operatic slice of downgrade Americana.
Watching Mel and Erin heading for Dead Man’s Gulch on his Harley Davidson you feel you’re eight years old again, sitting in the local fleapit on your father’s knee.
It’s high octane fuel, a powder keg that explodes in your face in almost every scene. As you try to catch your breath more baddies arrive, looking as if they’ve spent too much time at Mel’s tattoo parlour. Neither are any of them candidates for beauty contests.
But you just know that Mel, even a weatherbeaten Mel, is going to give them what’s for. He’s going to protect his little daughter and make up for the sins of the past, even at the foot of Boot Hill.
Game on!
Fair **
