Starring: Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, Diego Luna, William H. Macy, Miguel Sandoval, Michael Parks
Distributor: Icon Films
Runtime: 88 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2016
| 
| 
Mel Gibson has been through very hard times in the last decade, personal crises, anger outbursts and prejudice, alcoholism, damaged relationships. And, he has been off the screen for most of the decade and has not directed a film since Apocalypto (2007). So, the question has arisen, at age 60 is his career over? In 2016, not so. He is starring in the thriller, Blood Father, and he has directed a high profile war film, Hacksaw Ridge.
In many ways this is a routine action show, high octane, as they say – and it does involve cars and motorbikes.
The villains in the film are bikies and the tough enforcers of the Mexican drug cartels. covered in tattoos – handy for Link, Gibson, who has spent years with the bikes, nine years in jail, has learned and practices the tattooist trade and is able to recognise the meanings in tattoo designs and so assess the muscle that is pursuing.
His teenage daughter, who has not lived with him but with her wealthy mother, has disappeared for four years. She is seen teamed up with one of the cartel bosses, in love with him, pressurised to take part in violent raids with him, literally coked up. When he wants her to shoot someone and she finds she can’t, despite the drugs, her gun goes off with her boyfriend becoming the target.She decides to go on the run but also to phone her father who lives in a caravan out in the desert, going to AA programs, tattooing with a good supportive friend, William H. Macy, as his sponsor.
The film runs for under an hour and a half so the action tends to move, the daughter coming home, thugs tracking her down, gunshots, the overturning of the caravan, father and daughter hot footing it from the trailer camp, finding out what is happening – and Link still has some contacts in prison who enable him to get the background of his daughter’s boyfriend, and the increasing dangers they are in.
Link decides to call on an old friend about whom he was silent in his years in prison and believes he can ask favours. He is an old bar bikie, with Vietnam memories, played intensely and strangely by Michael Parks.
While the setting is California, the film was made in New Mexico with good desert and mountain location photography, just the place for a showdown, the cartel thugs presuming they are supreme and certainly underestimating Link and his shrewdness and ingenuity.
So, daughter in peril, contact with father, father helping daughter, both on the run, problem solved, but not without a great deal of pathos.
The film was directed by Jean-François Richet, best known for his double French film series, Mesrine, the story of a celebrated French criminal played by Vincent Casell and the remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13.
12 Random Films…
