WOW! There is simply no other word to start this review with! This is a fabulous picture from start to finish. This is Hollywood at it's very best in an age of remakes and horribly unoriginal material. Mel Gibson put something on the screen that we have never seen before and if there is any fairness in Hollywood he will be rewarded for it in March. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is living a very happy and tranquil life in the Mayan rainforest. His village has been in existence forever. He has a wife, a small son and a child on the way. He hunts with the other men of the village, including his father, and life is good. It's paradise until one day at dawn all that changes. A group of vicious and brutal men (savages) come and destroy his village, capture all the men and women and take them away. Some are killed in a fierce battle and Jaguar Paw manages, before being caught, to hide his pregnant wife and son in a deep pit by lowering them down with a rope. All the adults are marched away leaving the children there alone to fend for themselves. The adults are taken to a Mayan city where the women are sold and the men are painted blue in preparation to being sacrificed to the sun god. Jaguar Paw has three problems. He must somehow escape, he has to find his way back home AND he has to rescue his family from the pit BEFORE it rains and they drown! Love of family, survival and determination are strong motivators and our hero shows all three in true big screen, epic style. Mel Gibson has honed his craft so fine that he is now among the greatest directors of all time. His direction of this picture was flawless and had some very unique camera angles while keeping the images pure with very little CGI. The story is raw, harsh and HISTORIC! Some have said that the graphic violence in this picture is gratuitous. Nothing could be further from the truth. The violence is necessary to show the brutality of the captors (vile savages) and the decadence of a society that had so little respect for human life that they cut the hearts out of living men and then decapitated them and threw the heads to the cheering crowd below. This was HISTORIC violence like slavery, the Inquisition and the Holocaust. It happened and Mel brought it to the screen in a way that makes us cringe and at the same time realize that all the Mayans were not of this vicious society, just as all Americans did not own slaves. The acting was superb and our hero, played by Rudy Youngblood was fabulous! There is not one word of English spoken in this picture, as it is entirely in the Mayan native language, but Mel (and the subtitles) still managed to make us all part of the village as we cheered for the universal hero. This picture is a winner by Hollywood and literary standards and I see Oscar® written all over it. When I left the theater I was ashamed that I hadn't paid MORE to see it. Fabulous! RECOMMENDATION: This is one of the best pictures I have seen in some time. I strongly recommend it be seen by all adults! NO SMALL KIDS! This picture is very intense and is rated R because of savage violence and VERY graphic images. TWO HISTORICALLY BLOODY (and muddy) THUMBS UP!!! (Mel, you the MAN!) Movie Review © 2006 by Terry Anderson |
