a5c7b9f00b An ex-con reunites with his estranged wayward 17-year old daughter to protect her from drug dealers who are trying to kill her. Before leaked comments of a drunken Mel Gibson ranting anti Semitic comments at a policeman torpedo his career options, Gibson was a bonafide, A list, star. He made his name on the rough and ready, seminal classic Mad Max and its sequels, cementing his status in the buddy cop movie genre with the Lethal Weapon films. <br/><br/>While his career was in the ascendancy, he enhanced his reputation further with stints behind the camera, directing and starring in The Man Without A Face and Braveheart. He continued and continues to direct, receiving a lukewarm reception for the religious effort, The Passion of Christ and doing better box office in 2006&#39;s Apocalypto. <br/><br/>Around the same time of Apocalypto gearing up for a cinema release, Gibson&#39;s drunken, anti Semitic rant came to light and it became a hard decade for the star. It would be 2010 before he would &#39;open&#39; a film with Edge of Darkness. The film, though right in Gibson&#39;s wheelhouse, failed to reignite his career, grossing only half its cost. <br/><br/>2016 and Gibson has returned once again with the lazily named Blood Father. Blood Father sees GibsonLink, an ex con and recovering alcoholic, whose estranged daughter, Lydia (Erin Moriaty), who we see has been missing since the age of fourteen, calls him up after she, mistakenly it turns out, believes she has killed her Mexican gangland boyfriend, Jonah. Desperate to reconnect with his child, Link leaves his tattoo parlour, trailer home and goes to rescue his daughter. <br/><br/>The father rescuing his daughter is a well trodden trope in film, with one of the best executions of the genre being 2008&#39;s Taken, a film that raised the bar for hard nut fathers protecting their daughters. Where Taken had a quick build up and continual escalating action, Blood Father suffers from being a film of continual build up. <br/><br/>When they are forced to flee his trailer park home, having been found by Jonah&#39;s gang, they go and see an old acquaintance of Links, Preacher, who he&#39;s says owes him for keeping his silence whilst incarcerated. Preacher turns out to be a bit of a git. Not that he exactly was hiding his displeasure at reacquainting with Link, evenLink reminds him that he owes him for his silence, Preacher pretty much tells him that they are no longer friends. Finding out there is a price on the daughter&#39;s head, Preacher decides he wants to collect the reward and tries to hold them both. Link extricates them from the situation and they are forced on to the road once again. <br/><br/>Their next trip takes them to a clichéd, any town, motel. Ignoring a chance for the relationship between father and daughter to be explored, the film goes another direction. What we get is infantile attraction between Lydia and the young night worker at the motel, who Lydia decides to visit during the night. He, puppy eyed, tells her that their faces are all over the news. Lydia calls Link, they have to leave. At the same time, a terminator-esque contract killer, The Cleaner - this is shown by his execution of a couple of police officers -is also looking for the on-the-run father and daughter and he is not giving out hugs. <br/><br/>With both of their identities having been broadcast on national television, Link, who had been sporting a Grizzly Adams of a beard, shaves and Lydia dyes her hair from dark to blonde. A clean shaven Link goes back to prison to get information on who might be trying to kill them, meanwhile a now blonde Lydia is found by her not dead ex, Jonah - because a blonde could not have killed anybody - and kidnapped. The film is trundles towards its climax. Jonah intercepts a call from Link and agrees to an exchange. In a rocky, desert location, Link goes to meet up with Link and his cronies in the hope of getting his daughter back. Using an explosiona distraction, Link is killed by the Cleaner in a shoot outhe rescues Lydia. Lydia cleans up her life in homage to her father. <br/><br/>As a film Blood Father is okay. it is not terrible, nor is it great. The acting is good across the board, even though the actors are given very little to work with in some regards. It is pretty much the Mel Gibson show, though for some reports to say it is a return to form - whatever that means - is disingenuous. Gibson has always been a credible actor regardless of his less than savoury public utterings. Regardless of the vehicle, he has always brought a believable performance and does and has done good work. Blood Father, though not awful, is a film that you can wait for on your local streaming platform. &#39;Blood Father&#39; is exactly what is expected from Mel Gibson at this time. He is making a comeback and this low budget film is a test to see if he still has box office draw.<br/><br/>The character is perfect for him - Anti-Hero, like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen used to play. We root for him even though he&#39;s a Bad Boy because he&#39;s redeeming himself by saving his daughter.<br/><br/>The plot is simple: Link is an ex-con trying to stay clean and sober, living in a trailer near his AA Sponsor, Kirby. Link&#39;s daughter, Lydia, shows up on his trailer step, running from her ex-boyfriend and his gang. Almost immediately, the gang shows up. Link and Lydia go on the run together.<br/><br/>This is a real action film like Mel&#39;s first breakout film, &#39;Mad Max.&#39; Don&#39;t get upset - I&#39;m not comparing the films, I&#39;m comparing the budgets. Like &#39;Mad Max,&#39; this is not a film shot almost completely with Green Screen. And it isn&#39;t edited with the &#39;2 Second Rule,&#39; there&#39;s a bit more time between action scenes…which are gritty and real, not cartoonish. <br/><br/>The suspense buildsit becomes obvious to Link that the guys shooting at them aren&#39;t a small gang Lydia&#39;s talking about. That gang is being chased by a bigger gang. And both gangs want Lydia dead. Then there&#39;s the police manhunt for the father-daughter fugitives. So Link and Lydia run…from the small gang, the big gang and the police.<br/><br/>&#39;Blood Father&#39; isn&#39;t realistic, and for the most part it&#39;s predictable and clichéd…I didn&#39;t expect &#39;Hamlet.&#39; I expected Mel. And even with the &#39;Noah&#39; beard, he&#39;s still got it. Mel may be gray and bearded in this film to distance himself a bit from his past image, but the star quality is still there. And later, he shaves and he&#39;s the Mel we recognize.<br/><br/>In his best performances, Mel opens himself up to the camera and shows the pain, the confusion and the anger inside him. No apologies, no self-pity, no explanation. Raw emotion. It may not be great acting, but, for me, it&#39;s amazing to watch.<br/><br/>The story is not original and the dialogue is sparse…it seems only to be searching for a good line at the &quot;I&#39;ll be Back&quot; level. Ironically, it doesn&#39;t need one. Mel storming across the room roaring at the villain is justgood, if not better. <br/><br/>Link is the Mel of the original &#39;Lethal Weapon&#39; when he was suicidal and reckless and crazy. The anguished father in &#39;Ransom.&#39; The traumatized and tortured vet in &#39;Conspiracy Theory.&#39; And the severely depressed psychotic husband and father in &#39;The Beaver,&#39; hanging on for dear life…whose last hope is to let a hand puppet live his life for him. <br/><br/>This is a role Mel can sink his teeth into - like the bad guy in &#39;Blood Father,&#39; whose ear Mel bites off. He&#39;s been beaten up by life…a life he regrets, but can&#39;t change. Then his daughter shows up and gives him a reason to fight to stay alive. <br/><br/>This Mel is the Mel after the past decade, the man who has been fighting his demons in public, demonizing himself and being blacklisted by Hollywood. This Mel is filled with rage and in Link he gets to release it in front of the camera.<br/><br/>&#39;Blood Father&#39; was everything I expected and more. It&#39;s 88 minutes of above average, low budget, cheer on the Anti-Hero, old fashioned action. I expected that. What I didn&#39;t expect was to see Mel Gibson storm across the screen and roar at the villain. It&#39;s now one of my favorite moments on film. If for no other reason, see &#39;Blood Father&#39; for &#39;The Roar.&#39; Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the moviea minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.
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