By now, whether we
want to know or not, it’s become depressingly clear the industry that produces
the movies we love, which enables us to lose ourselves in worlds of fantasy and
engage with other like-minded movie fans, is filled with closets, and those
closets are filled with skeletons, and those skeletons are hideous. Some of the
most revered people in Hollywood have had their falls from grace become very
public, becoming a hashtag on Twitter or a criminal charge that eventually
leads to litigation. Sometimes these people escape mostly unscathed, and after
a few years of chemical and reputational rehab, they can return to us and
re-obtain both greatness and the respect from audiences and colleagues they
lost. For others, their past misdeeds seem damn near unshakable, and no matter
how many apology tours they make and teachable moments they profess to learn
and movies they make to widen the time between their unfortunate past and their
hopeful present, those misdeeds won’t vanquish. I speak, of course, of Mel
Gibson.
For the record, I
hate having to include this journey back down Shitty Memory Lane, and normally
I abhor any other article or review that feels the need to shoehorn Gibson’s
past misdeeds into said article or review and make it a talking point. Separate
the artist from the art, as people often say, and ideally, that’s the way it
should be. After all, Polanski still gets to make films that win Academy
Awards, and Robert Downey Jr. still gets to play Iron Man 37 times and make 37
billion dollars at the box office. (For the record, I’m not equating them for
their past misdeeds, as they're not even in the same league. I’m more pointing
out that our favorite artists have engaged in varying degrees of terrible
behavior and should be judged accordingly.) Which brings me back to Mel Gibson,
and his newest endeavor as an actor, Force
of Nature, which also brings me to my point: had Gibson not so dramatically,
offensively, and disturbingly fallen from grace a decade ago, there’s no way in
bloody hell he’d be appearing in something so ham-fistedly stupid and
incompetently made as Force of Nature.
Somehow directed by Michael Polish, who developed somewhat of a small,
underground following after his two quiet and quirky indy dramas, Twin Falls Idaho and Northfork, Force of Nature feels like a script that would’ve been politely
rejected by Gibson somewhere in the late ‘90s following his string of his warmly
received thrillers Ransom and Conspiracy Theory. The reason I say
that is they already made this movie
in the late ’90s. Hard Rain, with
Christian Slater, Morgan Freeman (his first of what would be many forays into
mediocre genre entertainment), and the crazy Quaid brother, became legendary
during its production and following its release because every single person
creatively involved never missed a chance to describe how miserable a time they
had making it. As far as’90s action flicks that don’t star Van Damme go, it
was...a movie. The genre was kinda on its way out by then and would soon be
revamped by The Matrix and
Universal’s long-running Cars Go Fast
series, and when genres die for a little, they go out neither with a whimper
nor a bang, but a long and sustained whine that you wish would just shut the
fuck up. That’s where stuff like Force of
Nature belongs.
Emile Hirsch plays
a cop named Cardillo too young to be burned out and cynical, but we know he’s
burned out and cynical because he discourages his new partner, Jess (Stephanie
Cayo), from responding to calls on the police band and also says “fuck” a lot.
Following a meat-related disturbance call at a local grocery store (I’m not
lying), Cardillo crosses paths with Gibson’s retired cop, Ray, who seems to be
dying of cough and not that likeable. The Boston accent he’s trying on and the
stories he tells about being a cop that don’t exactly paint his past in the
best light immediately establishes that he’s going to be stubborn, violent, and
tough as nails. You also know that he’s an asshole, because at one point he
mutters to himself, “I’m such an asshole.” In the face of a growing hurricane,
Cardillo and Jess force-evacuate Ray from his apartment and naturally run afoul
of some pretty bad men, led by John “the Baptist” (David Zayas, playing a
villain almost as boring as the one he played in The Expendables), attempting to pull off a heist of some rare
black-market artwork. Naturally, Cardillo, Jess, and Ray are the only ones who
can intervene, save the day, uphold the rule of law, and yadda yadda yadda –
rest assured, had Gibson said no to this movie like he should’ve, Force of Nature would’ve been a Nicolas
Cage vehicle through and through, because that’s exactly the kind of thing
you’re getting.
The script is
dreadful, finding ways to split up all the different occupants of the Puerto
Rican apartment building where the majority of the film unfolds, which means
that – yep, Gibson’s face prominently displayed on the cover isn’t as prominent
as his role in the movie – leaving the film’s other bland characters to have
heart-to-heart conversations about sad things which is supposed to make them
feel like real people. The machinations of these well-worn tragedies feel so
trite that you halfway expect Gibson to break down in a sad monologue about
that one time on the force when he accidentally shot a kid and he’s been
looking for redemption ever since. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Hirsch’s
Cardillo takes the reins of the tragic backstory, which comes damn close to killing a kid, while Gibson’s Ray
mutters about being poisoned by his own shit (literally), hence all the
coughing. Meanwhile, in another apartment, a man named Griffin (William
Catlett) is recovering from the wounds inflicted by his real lion named Janet
he keeps locked in his closet and being cared for by Bergkamp (Jorge Luis
Ramos), who may or may not be an escaped Nazi, and if you’re reading all that
and thinking, “how on earth could Force of
Nature be boring?,” well, my friend, that’s because you haven’t seen Force of Nature. (And if you think
Janet the lion doesn’t figure into the bad guy’s comeuppance at the end, you’ve
never seen a movie in your life.)
One would be
tempted to think, and I wouldn’t blame them because I was hoping for this too,
that Force of Nature might be good,
at the very least, for watching Mel
Gibson be old and irascible and shoot lots of bad guys in violent ways. While
that does happen, it doesn’t happen nearly enough to make the overall
experience any more than tolerable. Not as engaging or suspenseful as Dragged Across Concrete, nor at least
as consistently if vapidly entertaining As Blood
Father, Force of Nature, let’s
hope, is the worst movie Gibson makes between now and the end of his career.
Whether or not he deserves better than something like this kind of dismissible
bilge is for you to debate, but what I can say, conclusively, is that audiences definitely deserved better.
FYI, the
1999 Sandra Bullock movie Forces of
Nature is currently available via HBO On Demand. I’ve never seen it, but
it’s gotta be better than this.
