Mel Gibson did some great work on his reputation for violence when he premiered Hacksaw Ridge here at Venice at couple of years ago.
To be sure, it contained horrific scenes of carnage but its medic hero, played by Andrew Garfield, was unbreakably pacifist.
Now Gibson is back to his good old, bad old ways in this rogue cop thriller, shown out of competition, directed by S Craig Zahler, whose credits include such delicacies as the cannibal Western Bone Tomahawk and the bash-fest Brawl In Cell Block 99.
This carefully built, slow-burn procedural belongs to the reactionary world in which, though the cops may be bad, the bad guys are so much worse — we can only be grateful.
Gibson plays Brett, a gnarled and grizzled veteran, coming up to 60 but — thanks to his inability to play politics — still working on the streets, with a much younger partner, Tony (Vince Vaughn, a Zahler regular), bantering away.
In a fine opening scene, Brett and Tony skilfully carry out an arrest of an armed suspect without bloodshed — but a neighbour films it, showing Brett with his foot firmly on the perp’s head, and releases the footage to a TV news channel. They’re suspended without pay for six weeks.
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Brett, living in a bad neighbourhood, with a crippled wife and a daughter regularly assaulted on the streets, is desperate. He talks Tony into a plan to carry out a robbery themselves, a
robbery of a criminal to be sure, but still a robbery, to change their lives for the better.
As they trail their mark, though, he and his gang carry out a murderous machine-gun bank robbery — and they decide they have to pursue the killers themselves. “We’re it,” they tell themselves, tooling up for a colossal shoot-out.
Zahler is not subtle but he is bludgeoningly effective. In an unforgettably cruel scene, Jennifer Carpenter plays a new mother tearfully reluctant to go for her first day back to work, kissing baby’s foot goodbye — before heading off to carnage at the bank.
In another, shall we say visceral, scene, a swallowed key is retrieved with a sharp knife. And as for Mel Gibson, at 62 he’s still a lethal weapon too, it turns out.
