With Mel Gibson being in the news again for all the wrong reasons, it’s easy to forget that he still makes movies. His latest film “Get the Gringo,” is soon quietly arriving on a TV screen near you.
The film, which Gibson co-wrote and co-produced, looks like the polar opposite of his last film “The Beaver.” It’s a South of the Border crime drama featuring blood and guts, double-crosses, hot women, mean thugs and dying clowns.
With its grimy look, noirish set-up and pulpy dialogue/narration, “Gringo” looks like it might play like “Payback in Mexico,” with Gibson’s haywire intensity (some would say insanity) is on full display.
His days as an A-list star are finally over, and his filmic legacy will no doubt be permanently tarnished by his asinine bigoted behavior, but those hoping that “Gringo” will be a completely bananas trainwreck may be disappointed by the following clips, which are pretty by-the-numbers.
In the first clip, we see how Gibson’s character (never identified by name) ended up in a dank, brutal Mexican prison. He’s the clown driving the car.
It turns out that the Driver, as Mel becomes to be known (much like Ryan Gosling in “Drive”), has a past he’d like to forget.
He also knows how to get his way, as seen in these two low-key clips in which he interacts with the locals and starts to identify his place in this new world:
It was directed by Adrian Grunberg, who worked as an assistant director on Gibson’s “Edge of Darkness” and “Apocalypto.”
“Get the Gringo” premieres on DirecTV on May 1.