While he’s certainly had his issues off-screen, there’s no one else in Hollywood that can quite equal Mel Gibson when it comes to approaching something inescapably brutal with certain sense of earnestness. Despite the fact skulls were pulped, faces were lashed and some rather nasty things happened to horses, it was that almost drunkenly romantic look at William Wallace that managed to nab the oft-problematic actor/director an Oscar, and from there, we all know how stratospherically gruelling The Passion Of The Christ was as it focused on the final hours of the life of Jesus Christ. Even Gibson’s muscular arthouse oddity, Apocalypto, managed to make ancient Mayans impressively relatable as all manner of ghastly atrocities befell them.
Basically, what I’m saying is, if there’s a director alive who could stick someone as nice and gentle as Andrew Garfield into an uncomprisingly savage war movie and make it work, like it or not, it was going to be Gibson…
Due to both his Seventh-day Adventist upbringing and a childhood incident where he seriously injured his brother, Desmond Doss grows up to be especially sensitive to the commandment that declares “Thou Shalt No Kill”. But after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour and the United States finds itself joining the struggle of World War II, Desmond feels compelled to enlist and do his part despite the fact that his very nature is to be a conscientious objector. Despite this clash of ideals, there are a few other elements that suggest he should maybe sit the war out, such as his budding romance with nurse, Dorothy Schutte and the issue of his father’s severe PTSD caused by his stint in the last Great War.
After starting basic training under a typically aggressive Sergeant, Desmond excels at most tasks and even starts to make friends, but the very moment they move onto weapons training, Doss is adamant that his profound beliefs will not allow him to even handle a weapon, much less shoot someone with it. Mislabelled a coward and pressured to quit by his superiors, Doss doubles down and ultimately faces a court-martial for disobeying direct orders – but even if that gets all settled, there’s still the actual war to deal with.
Ultimately earning his right to serve his country (even if he won’t be armed to do it) Desmond goes on to train as a medic like planned to do from the start, but soon he and the men he trained with enter the horrors of the Battle Of Okinawa. Their mission is to scale and secure the Maesa Encarpment – also dubbed “Hacksaw Ridge” – and it soon turns into a frenzied bloodbath with massive casualties on both sides. But while blood, flames, mud and quite a few limbs fly all over the place, can a weaponless Doss survive in such an environment, much less do any good?
If you thought the Passion Of The Christ was epically bloodthirsty and sadistic for a film that predominantly featured the figure of Christ himself, then chances are you’ll be caught similarly unawares for possibly the most violent film about pacifism that exists, as Gibson flaunts both his love for harrowing violence and heartfelt themes with equal reckless abandon. In fact, the flash-forward opening sequence sees bodies mangled, burnt and hurled through the air in agonising slow motion as Gibbo literally can’t wait to show us just how visceral his war scenes are going to get. Later on, when we return to this carnage during the actual battle, once again we’re struck by how a film with such a peaceful, central message can squeeze in more gratuitous gore gags than an Evil Dead marathon, as bullets hollow out screaming men like pumpkins and bodies are graphically rent asunder by various grades of explosives. But possibly the most jarring thing about it is that wading through the mud and the blood is Hollywood’s nicest man: Andrew Garfield.
Just by his smiley, mild-nannered demeanor alone, you’d suggest that Garfield would be an ill-fit for a gung-ho war flick – especially one as frenzied as Gibson makes it – but while you’d expect that his stint as Spider-Man would be as far as he’d venture into action cinema, the fact that his character is unshakable in his resolve about not harming a living soul under any circumstances suddenly makes him the perfect casting, especially when Gibson surrounds the characters with multiple variations of the alpha male. Hell, one of his fellow soldiers is even introduced doing pull ups while stark bollock naked – Gibbos not much one for subtlety, obviously. But as Doss starts to feel the pressure from Vince Vaughn’s caustic-tongued Sergeant (excellent) or Sam Worthington’s growly captain (fair). The film takes various shifts and turns to get us to a point where it can finally make… well, it’s point.
Before we watch Garfield survive actual hell due to how unbelievably nice he is, we see him grow up under Hugo Weaving’s traumatised patriarch and Rachel Griffiths’ fretting mother and learn his strict moral code while also hitting on Teresa Palmer’s pretty nurse. I have to say, I found this section to be almost as unsubtle as the splattery war-gore, as Gibson’s earnestness veers into soap opera territory and all Garfield’s accent seems to be missing is a Goofy-style “A-hyuck” laugh. But once I discovered that that’s how the real Doss actually spoke, it blew the cynical mist from my eyes to show me that with every dopey grin and every defiant line reading, the actor is putting in a hell of a performance to get across just how decent this man truly was.
From here Gibson then obviously fancies making his version of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, but one where Private Pyle was less a doughy fuck-up and more of an iron-willed contentious objector. It’s all here – animosity from his bunk mates, alienation from his superiors and some seriously incendiary put-downs from an excitedly game Vaughn. But while a lot of movies could have ended with the court case that allows a gun-avoiding Doss to finally go to war, you can tell that the director has been itching to get to that war stuff. Yes, there are some issues – Gibson often portrays the Japanese with horror movie tropes complete with jump scares and eerie green lighting, and he even can’t resist throwing some seppuku in there too when the tide turns. However, once we get to the final section of the film that sees Desmond scamper around a devastated wasteland, trying to save everyone he can under cover of acrid fog (including Japanese), all of Gibson painful sincerity suddenly makes perfect sense. With everything that Doss has been through to get to his moment and save a staggering 75 wounded men by getting them to safety one at a time, the director may be using some of his old, unsubtle tricks from Passion Of The Christ by following grotesque gore with heavy-handed pathos, but by golly it works.
While some will find Gibson’s mere presence a deal breaker, others may find some of that heavy handedness with both the emotion and the guts a bit too much to stomach. However, when it comes to laying out unabashed emotion without tumbling fully into schmaltz, Gibson’s skills are greatly enhanced by a deranged stunt team, an overworked special effects unit and the sheer irresistible likability of Andrew Garfield.
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