Don’t Look Now, But Mel Gibson Is Doing Some Of The Most Riveting Work Of His Career In ‘Blood Father’ And ‘Dragged Across Concrete’

It’s maybe not the most surprising thing that’s happened lately, but after torching his own reputation more than a decade ago, Mel Gibson is quietly rebuilding a following. The new Mel persona is a meaner, more weatherbeaten figure out of pulp novels and film noir, built on the ashes of Mel’s real-life reputation. At 64, he looks not just older but carved and knotty, like a shillelagh. His voice is like crushed gravel seasoned with arsenic. Dragged Across Concrete is not just a movie he was in. It’s his life story. Alcohol did the dragging.

We’re a long way from the Mullet Mel of Lethal Weapon and Braveheart. Onscreen Mel these days is a wicked cuss, ornery and brutal. Like Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, he’s a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking.

When Blood Father, an obscure low-budget Mel neo-noir that was barely released in August of 2016, hit Netflix on March 26, it rose to number two on the most-watched movies chart (and has been a consistent fixture in the Netflix Top 10). The even pulpier cops-gone-bad indie Dragged Across Concrete (2019), from the new master of grindhouse cinema director S. Craig Zahler, hit HBO on April 1. There, Gibson plays an unapologetic racist who gets innocent people killed as he tries to turn the tables on some lowlifes, and the film is like a mason jar of cinematic hooch. Don’t watch it with your mom in the room. Better yet, don’t watch it at all. You might be offended. The inappropriateness police should ticket everyone involved in this movie. The brutality of the dirty cops played by Gibson and his pal Vince Vaughn is not the kind of thing play-it-safe Hollywood studio executives tolerate anymore, which is why Zahler is working outside the studio system, where he can stage any sordid, awful thing he puts his mind to.

Which makes him a great collaborator for Gibson. The new, darker Mel is fully informed by real-life Mel’s dark episodes. In a painfully self-referential speech in the rough and smart Blood Father, his character John Link tells a 12-step group, “I did a lot of damage. Lost a lot of people along the way. Some of them stay lost….Ex that won’t talk to me. Every skill I ever had, every friend I ever knew is now a parole violation. But you can’t be a prick all your life and just say ‘never mind.’ I can’t fix everything I broke. All I can do is not drink. So I won’t do that today.” Torn from Gibson’s diary, or so it sounds. Link, who is on parole, is trying to stay out of trouble when his missing daughter calls to inform him that the gang bangers she has been hanging out with are trying to kill her after she shot one of them. Dad understands these guys: They’ll “take you out in the desert, rape you, put a bullet in your brain, have a baloney sandwich.” But when the bullets fly he decides he kind of enjoys it. His rage muscles need a workout anyway: “Maybe some people need hurting. With a chain,” he says, before anything’s even gone wrong. Link is the kind of guy who beats another guy senseless with the side of his head. Not even the forehead!

Freed from the lowest-common-denominator demands of big-budget studio blockbusters, Gibson is doing some of the most riveting work of his career. Who needs charming Mel, heartthrob Mel or noble Scottish Mel? He’s found liberation in low budgets, working with B-movie auteurs like Zahler and Jean-Francois Richet, the director of Blood Father, who earlier made the French gangster epic Mesrine: Killer Instinct. Mel already has four more movies in the can awaiting release, one of them from Smokin’ Aces director (and Bad Boys for Life co-writer) Joe Carnahan.

What’s refreshing about Mel is how he leaned into his personal failings, mostly fueled by liquor. He got picked up on a DUI in 2006 (80 mph in a 35 mph zone on the Pacific Coast Highway), said rotten things to the cops, then went on an anti-Semitic rant. Years later, he pleaded no contest to a charge of battering his girlfriend after a 2010 tape was released in which he was heard shouting vicious, racist things to her. Gibson’s character in Blood Father makes a point of mentioning that one of his misadventures happened on the Pacific Coast Highway (a motorcycle mishap that bought John Link a steel plate in his skull).

Mel has demons. But if he has conquered his drinking problem, as he suggests he has, he has probably put a lot of other issues to bed, too. Like his friend Robert Downey Jr., who years ago said he would only do Iron Man 4 if Gibson directed it, he walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Crazy and emerged not only intact, but stronger than before. May the Melaissance continue.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review and a columnist for The New York Post.

Where to stream Blood Father

Where to stream Dragged Across Concrete