Get The Gringo a.k.a. How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2 Stars (out of four)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  However, despite this opening, this is not a review of schadenfreude.  Mel Gibson at one time was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and was one of my favorites.  After some very unfortunate outbursts and recordings, he isn't quite what he used to be and has been relegated to roles that were nothing what he used to play.  Get The Gringo (aka How I Spent My Summer Vacation) is at times exciting, odd, confusing and sometimes downright unpleasant.  Mel plays a career criminal who pulls off a huge heist and crashes inside Mexico.  Because he has a large amount of cash on him, corrupt Mexican cops arrest him and throw him in a huge prison called La Pueblito.  The prison is more like a huge enclosed strip mall that houses both criminals and their families.  Mel falls in with a streetwise 10-year-old kid who tells him the lowdown of who's who and what's what inside the prison.  When word gets out about the money he stole, criminals both inside and outside the prison and on both sides of the border want him dead.  What then follows is a convoluted revenge plot where Mel, of course, ends out on top.  (NOT a spoiler.  Did you honestly think he wouldn't?)

The movie abruptly changes tone from action flick to prison drama to revenge flick to Grindhouse over-the-top actioneer.  The story doesn't make a lot of sense and keeps adding characters and wrinkles that should have been brought out earlier.  It is pretty intense at times, too.  This IS Mel Gibson, after all, the creator of the bloodbaths Braveheart, We Were Soldiers and Apocalypto.  But also like those films, it is engaging.  This movie could have been horrible in lesser hands.  It's sort of Escape From New York meets Lockup, and holds more than a few similarities to another one of his films, The Payback.  And while it does tilt, it never goes completely off the rails.  Like it or not, Mel has charisma to spare and it helps immensely in this film.  And while he has aged quite badly, he still pulls off the film.  It is schlock, yes, but he has a long way to go if moviegoers will ever take him back, if ever. 

A big complaint I have, though, is that it is genuinely unsettling at times at the type of violence in the film.  While I am no prude for any story element being in a film, whether it be nudity, violence or whatever, there has to be a reason for it.  It cannot be included for its own sake; otherwise it is just gratuitous.  There is a subplot where the kid Mel works with is an exact blood type match for the ruler of the prison.  The kid is being kept alive for his liver for a later transplant.  Well, the time eventually comes, but not before the bad guys torture his mother and he stabs himself to ruin the liver.  We also get to see the surgery in detail.  As this is going on, I'm asking myself, "Is this REALLY necessary?". If I'm asking myself that, chances are, it probably isn't.  There is also a slow motion shoot out that, while exciting, several innocent bystanders are wounded or killed in the crossfire.  While this does prompt the denouement of the Mexican government shutting down the prison, this is not exactly the type of scene I expect from American moviemakers.  Maybe that is the point.  It seems more at home in a over-the-top Chinese actioneer like Hard Boiled or The Killer and totally out of place here.

In the end, it's not great.  However, it is not horrible, either.  Turn your brain off and go, and you might like it.  It's not Citizen Kane, but it's not Plan 9 From Outer Space, either.