Jungle Drummed

"Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and... oh."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Aw, damn man!  Did you see that dude buy it?  Wasn't that sweet?

The Downside:  Different language, same song.

    As a filmmaker, let's give Mel Gibson his due for one thing- he is obviously not a man who is enslaved to the ideas of focus groups or marketing demographics.  Circa 1994 if you put ten movie execs in a room and asked each to come up with their own formula for a hit, what do you think the odds would be that you would get a 3-hour costume epic about a Scottish bloke no one has ever heard of, a gory retelling of the crucifixion of Christ, and even better, a subtitle piece about the fall of the Mayan civilization?  All hindsight aside, just my thought that the chances would run somewhere in the region of a thousand monkeys typing out the works of Shakespeare.

    So Apocalypto, at first blush, exudes an aura of ultra-high concept, almost to the point that there have been not few among us (including me) who have handed down our own omens that Gibson's carte blanche follow-up to his box-office-saving Passion of the Christ would be his own personal career Armageddon, and this was before he decided to go all Henry Ford on a Malibu police officer this summer.  On one hand, there's admiration for a man so willing to tune out the world around him and deliver to the screen exactly what he wants.  And on the other hand, that's precisely how we ended up with Lady in the Water.

    The surprise and disappointment of Apocalypto is that it is neither as good or as bad you'd expect on your most bi-polar days- if Passion was Gibson's first plunge into weighty, serious filmmaking (make no mistake- Braveheart was a great film, but no one took it for anything but the popcorn drama it was), then this is him dangling his feet, testing the water, and ultimately deciding to lounge in a deck chair instead.  There is little of the how of Apocalypto I can find fault with; a Gibson movie usually means the upper echelons in terms of cinematography, music (Braveheart vet James Horner delivers a properly unsettling score here), and pace.  However, all of this is some solace to the fact that I can find plenty to commiserate about regarding the what of Apocalypto, that coming from a filmmaker who is becoming as known for ballsy, out-of-the-box projects as Gibson and the movie's obvious clawing for an Nth degree of artistic cred, it boils down to little more than a Meso-American Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, what you would get if the Discovery Channel decided to produce its own made-for-cable action flick.

    This means that Apocalypto is very heavy on flying spears and shot after shot of people dashing through dense rainforest underbrush and very light on any weight or insight into a civilization that serves as the movie's touchstone.  The doomsayer title supposedly harkens to the fading light of the Mayans on the eve of the Spanish kicking down their doors, when the culture and empire began to crumble from within thanks to the old historical stand-bys of megalomanic power wielding and personality cults (intentional or not, modern parallels are perhaps the most textured meta nuances here), but Apocalypto crowds out the introspection with as many stunt sequences and ways for jungle nature to bring you down that it can pack into its 138 minute running time.  Somewhere around the halfway mark the story- strong-jawed village hunter Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) watches as his village is decimated and his people rounded up to be sacrifices in the far off lands of the "stone temples"- suddenly has its feet kicked out from underneath of it as it dawns on us that we're not watching an epic, we're watching The Fugitive with loin clothes and poisoned darts.  Jaguar Paw flees, trekking back to his village to rescue and be reunited with his pregnant wife and young son, dogged by a sampler of "bad" Mayans (this is as deep as Apocalypto's dichotomy goes) who, five-hundred years later, would all be distinguishable by five o'clock shadow and their love of cigars. 

    It makes for a fleeting, and at times fun, experience- and maybe Apocalypto could be better judged on terms of what is rather than what could.  But Gibson's craft here is the ricketiest we've seen (the stops and starts of Passion could be better blamed on the film-unfriendly source material), relying on a regiment of crutches.  Not least is the mystery of Jaguar Paw, seen as Happy Family Villager Man in the opening act,  engaging in an adrenaline-enthralling hunt and plenty of testosterone-ladeled jovial bantering with his friendly village-mates (strange that some of the dialogue here sounds like it wouldn't be that ill-at-home in American Pie), only to turn into Angry Dart-Blowing Rambo Man at the drop of a hat when the bat guano hits the fan.  So imbued does Apocalypto become with its set conventions to ignore the dynamics of world civilization in favor Jaguar Paw turning the tables on his pursuers in the most gristly and bloody ways imaginable (in other words, "cool"), at some point I geared myself up to hear Movie Trailer Guy Hal Douglas cut in with heavy taglines like "The hunters... have become the hunted!" and "This time, it's personal!"

    The gore itself, now becoming a tag of just about any Mel Gibson movie, actually feels reigned in- not the kind of shocking free-for-all of Braveheart, nor does it stumble the point of the film like it did with Passion.  There is no doubt Gibson likes his movies to be a roll in the muck, but to Apocalypto even the nastiest of nasties (a hunter is goaded into eating boar testicles, one poor sap gets a finely aimed spear to the head) never feels over-the-top or out of place, one appreciated restraint in a film full of plenty of inhibiting ones.  And I do like Gibson's  determination to make Apocalypto at least rank on a credibility scale, thumbing his nose name actors and subtitle-hating philistines, even if the dialogue occasionally floats off into the dream worlds of into Ray Ramano sit-coms and the collective works of Dolph Lungren.

    Apocalypto is a sparkler of an idea- I'd love to see more movies that aren't the same dance around the same pole, but this is also its own apocalypse.  Oddly, this Gibson creation is the closest cousin to his days of Lethal Weapon and Mad Max.  I don't know if I should frame my disappointment by saying I was expecting more or expecting different, but I know wanted more than different costumes and a different language, but the same old pole.  B-

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