Critic Reviews

If you can separate the art from the artist — as most of us do at some point, or there’d be almost no movies or plays or novels or music or paintings left to enjoy — it’s a stone-cold gas.

Blood Father, directed by Jean-François Richet (Mesrine, Assault on Precinct 13), works remarkably well as a grindhouse throwback, sporting a screenplay (from Peter Craig and Andrea Berloff, based on Craig’s novel) that’s better than it has any right to be.

As comeback projects go, Blood Father is stellar. It’s a wonder Quentin Tarantino, the king of career resurrection, didn’t get to Gibson first. The actors completely tears into the role of Link, a battered and disgruntled ex-con. Richet matches him, delivering a muscular and deliriously entertaining B-movie that is sure to play like gangbusters with genre aficionados.

Luckily for Gibson fans, the movie’s a small gem: a good old-fashioned chase picture, thickened with pulp.

Mr. Gibson makes a persuasive derelict John Wayne with a loose, energetic performance, finely tuned comic timing and an amused, self-aware “Lethal Weapon” glint.

A violent, grungy, Peckinpah-lite action thriller that’s worth checking out just to be reminded how powerful an actor Mel Gibson continues to be even—if the parts aren’t coming like they once were.

An efficient and pleasurable bad-man-tries-to-go-good exposition that gives Gibson ample opportunity to flex his now-somewhat-grizzled movie-star muscle.

Operating for much of its running time with an equal balance between guilty pleasure grittiness and decent father/daughter drama, the film’s conclusion tips toward the latter in an unconvincing shift toward sentimentality and Life Lessons that not only is out of place, but betrays John’s own code of stoic endurance.

Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a 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.

The film shrewdly capitalizes on Mel Gibson's off-screen embarrassments and controversies.