The following is a film review and analysis I composed for The Last Ditch in 2007. I am reposting it here to set the stage for my upcoming reconsideration of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to be published during Holy Week.
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| Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw in Gibson's "Apocalypto" |
by Andy Nowicki
Mel Gibson's latest movie, Apocalypto, is at the end of its run in theaters. Opening in early December, the film achieved a modest success, raking in nothing close to what The Passion of the Christ made, but still earning somewhere close to Braveheart's overall gross.What makes that modest success extraordinary is the fact that Gibson has essentially become a persona non grata in the film industry since his run-in with a Jewish policeman who arrested him for drunken driving in August 2006. If Passion didn't alienate Gibson from Hollywood's largely Jewish movers and shakers, including the distributors — the men who made Gibson rich and famous, and are now eager to unmake him — then his drunken anti-Semitic tirade on the occasion of his arrest, widely broadcast across the nation afterwards, surely did.
