Get the Gringo (Grunberg, 2012)

[Irish]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5b/Get_The_Gringo_Key_Art.jpg/343px-Get_The_Gringo_Key_Art.jpg

IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1567609/)

[Irish]

I enjoyed this quite a bit. It's something of a trifle, but Gibson exhibits flashes of the guy he used to be pre-Beaver and violent outbursts. The guy who played cocky, fun, and disturbed in movies like Lethal Weapon and Payback. If you're a fan of that guy, you'll like this movie.

The story gets increasingly messy and less interesting by the time the third art rolls around, but there's a couple of plot elements that redeem it (which I won't spoil).

The best part, for me, was the setting. The movie takes place in a bizarre open air prison in Mexico that's based on an actual place. It's the kind of environment that'd be at home in a Tarantino movie, and wouldn't be believable if it weren't real.

[TGM]

Didn't make the poll public. Could you go ahead and redo the thread, please?

[Raiders]

I made it public.

Yes, I just realized that naturally I could do this at a database level. Sorry for all the earlier efforts of deleting and re-creating.

[Irish]

Oops, sorry about that -- and thanks, Raiders.

[Grouchy]

Through an explosive combination of hard-ass Christian beliefs, drunk driving and drunk ranting, Mel Gibson has gone from being a superstar turned Oscar-winning director to a guy with no career to speak of, looking for a comeback. It's a shame because, like I said on the Mad Max 4 thread, Gibson is a better and more charismatic action star than most of his colleagues, mostly because he's also a damn good actor. In this self-produced vehicle he plays the persona that fits him best, that of a hard-boiled crook with a penchant for survival. In the opening scene, he's arrested in the U.S.-Mexico border and the corrupt Mexican cops take him to one of their jails and keep his loot for themselves.

The film is directed by the AD of Apocalypto and his work is serviceable. Mostly TV-like craftmanship, with a few dialogue scenes where I wished the camera had stayed fixed in one place longer. But the script - it's damn good, surprisingly. Action movies today are mostly a bloodless, soulless affair, the heroes looking cool but having no personality to speak of. Instead, Gibson's driver is a bitter individual who finds resources to survive out of thin air and, what is more, those resources might be implausible but not completely movie-like. They are witty and grounded.

This movie won't change anyone's life, it's just a classic crime story well done, but it is kind of unfair that the Mel Gibson curse has sent it to DTV only in the US while it's better stuff than most of what gets released today. It certainly has more meat and bones in it than a Fast and the Furious entry, and it has the feel of a movie that is helmed by people who enjoy making it and not manufactured by a committee.