Reviewed by Neil Davey
Stars Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez,
Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead,
Raoul Trujillo, Rodolfo Palacios
Written by Mel Gibson and Farhad Safinia
Produced Mel Gibson and Bruce Davey
Certification US R | UK 18 | Australia MA15+
Runtime 137 minutes
Directed by Mel Gibson
How do you follow up a brutal religious epic? Well, if you’re Mel Gibson you follow it up with, er, a brutal sort-of religious epic. After calling a police officer ‘Sugar Tits’ of course. Apparently determined to make commercial success as unlikely as he can, follows up The Passion of the Christ — his not-as-funny-as-the-original remake of Life of Brian — with Apocalypto, a rainforest chase movie told entirely in the Mayan language with subtitles and regular decapitations.
It is, clearly, a film of great ambition and scope. The climactic chase scene is almost stupidly exciting. But there’s a sense of imbalance here (imbalance? There’s something you don’t expect in a Mel Gibson movie) and, sadly, it just means that a film that could have been an unexpected classic falls some way short. Or, arguably, bum-numbingly long. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is a young man from a small village. A hunter, a father, and a leader-in-waiting, his peaceful existence (well, peaceful-ish, provided you’re not a wild boar) is destroyed when an invading force raids his village.
Hiding his pregnant wife and young son in an underground cave, Jaguar Paw puts up a brave fight but soon finds himself, with the rest of his village, taken prisoner by Holcane warriors and taken away to meet one of two fates. For the women, it’s a life of slavery. For the men, it’s a somewhat shorter life of being led up a big pyramid and having your heads lopped off to appease the sungod. Circumstances — and a twist last seen in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — sees Jaguar Paw given the chance to escape and return to the woman he loves. Assuming he can outrun the heavily armed, really rather annoyed Holcane warriors on his tail.
And the adrenaline-fuelled, action packed climax is terrific. Just a shame then that it only lasts 45 minutes and Gibson takes a mammoth 90 minutes to get there. A little… okay, a lot of shaving of that first act would make everything so much tighter. There seems to be little reason why it should take Gibson — who, for all the pisstaking that he’s subjected to — is a fine filmmaker, 90 minutes to establish that these are the good guys and these are the bad guys which, ostensibly, is all the first act does. An hour of set-up, an hour of chase would have made this a sweaty palmed, edge-of-seat delight. In these proportions, it just feels like a wasted opportunity.