It’s difficult, if not impossible, to see Mel Gibson’s recent cinematic endeavors, including his ill-fated attempt to bring the stories of the Maccabees to the big screen with the serene assistance of the ever-dependable Joe Eszterhas outside of the context of Gibson’s well-publicized recent journey to the outer edges of insanity. At the height of his recent public infamy, Gibson uncomfortably played a wildly successful businessman who finds an unlikely means of escaping the lacerating self-loathing and suicidal depression throttling his soul by communicating through a beaver puppet in Jodie Foster’s ill-fated melodramatic psychodrama The Beaver.
Gibson followed up The Beaver with another project of the damned that seems to reflect and comment upon the reviled public pariah he has become over the past few years, this time a labor of love Gibson financed himself called Get The Gringo where Gibson plays a dead-eyed criminal who ends up in a Mexican prison that’s a world onto itself, a miniature Tijuana, really, after a lifetime of bad deeds.
Given the unwieldy baggage Gibson carries with him, it makes sense to cast him as a grizzled anti-hero, the kind of professional ne’er-do-well audiences find themselves rooting for against their better judgment and better angels. Gibson has not aged well, but he has aged interestingly. The years have robbed Gibson of his beauty, but lent him character; he now looks more like a tough-guy character actor than a pretty leading man, and Get The Gringo makes inspired use of good looks that used to be rugged and now feel ragged. In Get The Gringo Gibson plays a gifted thief with a spotty but still fundamentally intact moral compass who ends up in a massive, massively corrupt Mexican prison following a heist gone wrong. The prison is like none Gibson has ever seen, a co-ed affair where just about everything is available and allowed —guns, drugs, organ transplants, Coca-Cola, wrestling—except escape, and even that’s negotiable under the right circumstances.
Gibson initially cares about nothing beyond survival and being reunited with the money he stole before getting caught until he befriends a boy whose family is being used as a makeshift organ factory by a sickly kingpin, and he becomes an unlikely father figure to the boy. Gibson proves an unconventional mentor to the young boy: He keeps the boy from attempting to kill a gangster not by appealing to his sense of morality, but rather to his sense of pragmatism by pointing out how inherently doomed his killing strategies would be.
To its credit, Get The Gringo never professes to be anything more than a down and dirty B-movie coated in sleaze, with a distinct grindhouse feel to it. It’s unashamedly pulpy and vulgar, though it does over-reach in a third act that finds Gibson getting close to a bad guy played by Bob Gunton by impersonating Clint Eastwood over the phone. That’d be a ridiculous plot point under the best of circumstances, but the film pushes it even further into the realm of implausibility by having Gibson’s Eastwood impersonation sound an awful lot like Ronald Reagan. Then again, maybe Gibson just thinks all Republican tough-guy actors sound alike, which helps explain why his “Eastwood” also sounds a little like Gibson’s regular speaking voice.
Despite a strange infusion of wacky sitcom plotting toward the end—Gibson outwits the bad guys using techniques that wouldn’t fool Colonel Klink—Get The Gringo does exactly what it sets out to do: It’s a solid if less-than-spectacular drive-in movie for a post-drive-in era cursed to have its commercial prospects dimmed by its star/producer/financier’s seemingly never-ending, largely merited professional freefall.
