Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Imdb Rating 8.5/10

Director: Mel Gibson

Writers: Robert Schenkkan (screenplay), Andrew Knight (screenplay)

Stars: Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey

R | 2h 19min | Drama, History, War

Read imdb review Here

Movie Rating ★★★☆

 Mel Gibson roars back with bruising 'Hacksaw Ridge

Is "Hacksaw Ridge" Mel Gibson's redemption? Is it his atonement, or perhaps his miracle?

Don't worry, we won't be making any such weighty theological pronouncements — though these terms have all been bandied about in the run-up to Gibson's first directorial effort in the 10 years since "Apocalypto." That movie came out in 2006, only a few months after news broke of Gibson's drunken anti-Semitic rant, which has plagued his career ever since.

But "Hacksaw Ridge," the latest contribution to the canon of big World War II films, doesn't need any redemptive backstory. Whatever you think of Gibson, and whatever your position on the relevance of his personal flaws to his art, his filmmaking prowess is evident. This big, bruising, viscerally violent yet also often moving film should be judged on its merits.

"Hacksaw Ridge," starring the goofily appealing Andrew Garfield as the real-life character Desmond Doss, may not be a perfect movie, but it strikes an unusual balance. It's a violent film whose hero — and moral core — espouses non-violence. It's a war film that will also appeal to a faith-based audience. It's a film that at moments can feel relentlessly corny — and a second later, painfully, horribly real.

Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist, was the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. An Army medic, he refused to touch a weapon, believing he should be saving lives and not taking them. Though his exploits are a matter of record, we won't spill all the details here.

After an early introduction to Doss as a boy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, we pick up in young adulthood. When war breaks out with Japan, the young man feels compelled to enlist, despite the objections of his loving but abusive father (an excellent Hugo Weaving), a World War I veteran who was ruined by the experience. Doss is also going against the wishes of his new fiancee, Dorothy (fresh-faced Teresa Palmer), who begs him to stay. (The couple's meet-cute scenes are charming but extremely retro and not a little corny.)

Doss arrives at training camp, eager to serve. But when he won't touch a rifle, his superiors are aghast. "Private Doss does not believe in violence," taunts one sergeant. "Do not look to him to save your life on the battlefield!" He's played by Vince Vaughn, whose approach at first seems too comedic — as if in another movie. But he soon settles into an effectively understated performance.

Doss is pressured to leave the army — subjected to beatings, harassment, ultimately a court-martial — and only survives due to dramatic intervention from on high. And then it's on to Japan, to Okinawa and specifically the brutal battle at Hacksaw Ridge, high up on a punishing cliff where untold horrors await.

It is here that Gibson's hand is the surest. The suddenness which with death arrives in combat, the unfathomable randomness of it all, a man's jaunty bravado crumbling into paralyzing fear — the director sugar-coats nothing. As the men first climb toward their enemy, they pass their fallen comrades. Some corpses are in parts. Some have maggots crawling out of them.

It is during this battle that Doss becomes a hero, finding a way to save countless men by persevering when most others have been forced to retreat. He is guided by his faith; at one point, he asks God out loud what is expected of him. Garfield knows how to make such a scene feel honest — no easy feat.

Many fact-based movies end with some real-life footage. It's always welcome, but here, it's truly exciting to see Doss, alive and speaking (he died in 2006). His is a story you probably didn't know, and will be glad you did. Gibson does well by it.

Read full review at Daily Mail

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 Movie Rating ★★★★☆

 When Private saves the day

Yet another satisfying package from Hollywood about American war history.

Hollywood decided to keep its trump-card World War II flick till the end of the year (it did the same in 2015 too, with Bridge of Spies releasing in October).

Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more of glorious battlefield victories the USA could speak of, director Mel Gibson manages to tell us a startlingly different tale — of a soldier who refused to carry a weapon but ended up receiving a Medal of Honour for his services.

Based on the true story of combat medic Desmond Doss, essayed to a near perfect hillbilly-Virginian by Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge is perhaps the best (only?) war movie of 2016. The title refers to a steep cliff face located on the island of Okinawa in Japan and as Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) tells his unit, “Conquer Okinawa and you conquer Japan.”

The only problem is Private Doss is a very faithful Christian, a conscientious objector who refuses to hold a rifle. “With the world set on tearing itself apart, it don’t seem so bad of me to put a little bit of it back together,” he says when he’s tried for insubordination.

There are painful flashbacks from his childhood and years as a teen, when he decides he’d rather stay true to the Sixth Commandment (‘Thou shalt not kill”) than have any blood on his hands. He aspires to become a doctor after he receives compliments for strapping an ad-hoc, lifesaving tourniquet on an injured man’s leg. He goes on to save 75 more lives of comrades in uniform, who labelled him a coward for sticking to his religious beliefs, as bullets fly and grenades explode in the background.

Mel Gibson, wearing the director’s cap after ten years, remains a master of blood and gore while depicting the travails of a pacifist soldier. We saw how torture weapons sear and rip the human skin in Passion of the Christ, and later, how the innards of a tapir and a jaguar chewing on the face of a person look like in Apocalypto. Here, we see his visual mastery over blown-off limbs, corpses infested with rats and maggots and also, dishonoured Japanese committing harakiri.

Most of the dialogues are over-the-top (they strangely work), and Doss’ courtship with his future-wife (played by Teresa Palmer) is forgetful; they really need to do something about this stereotype of an excessively worried female partner, whose role is reduced to handing over a photograph of herself and saying, “Come back home to me.” Vince Vaughn as Sergeant Howell gives us a good dose of military humour while training his recruits (was he trying too hard to pull off a Full Metal Jacket though, I wondered). The last time I saw audience in a theatre resoundingly applaud and whistle for the main character in a war film was when Chris Kyle’s bullet found its target, nearly 2 km away, in American Sniper. This time they did it when Private Doss prays and places a Bible in his pocket before he goes all in with his unit for the last time.

Read full review at The Hindu

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Movie Rating ★★★★☆

Review by Robbie Collin

Mel Gibson goes to war with a bruising, fantastically moving comeback

What could have possibly attracted Mel Gibson to the story of Desmond Doss, a man whose unconventional religious beliefs made him a pariah among his peers, but who, once the system had learned to grudgingly accommodate him, worked wonders and saved souls through sheer force of conviction? Desmond was a committed Seventh Day Adventist and pacifist who served as a US Army medic at Okinawa, saving 75 lives without ever lifting a weapon – and the curiously ideal subject for what is unquestionably going to be viewed as Gibson’s comeback movie.

Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face – a kind of primary-coloured Guernica that flourishes on a big screen with a crowd. It is Gibson’s first film as director since Apocalypto in 2006 – and, more pertinently, since a string of scandals and public disgraces toxified his career in the years that followed.

Its story of an outcast finding redemption through superhuman levels of suffering is pure Gibson: you could even call it the third part of an unofficial trilogy that also takes in Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ (2004), except you sense Gibson will return in future to this story again and again, perhaps because of a deep-seated suspicion it may also be his.

It also owes a significant debt to Gallipoli (1981), the Peter Weir First World War epic in which Gibson won his first conventional leading man role. In Hacksaw Ridge, that part is taken by Andrew Garfield, an actor who has never struck me as remotely Gibson-like before – but here, his pushed-up hair, goofily handsome features and high-strung physicality amount, deliberately or otherwise, to a likeness that’s too uncanny to ignore.

The main difference is the voice, which Garfield makes high and cautious, almost Forrest Gump-like. In relation to the hard world around him, Desmond is a man askew – although the example of his sure-hearted faith will gradually bring others around to his angle.

The film begins in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains in 1929 and ends at the Battle of Okinawa 16 years later, and splits neatly into three parts. First, along with Desmond’s sweetheart Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), we grow to love him. (And discover Gibson and his cinematographer, Simon Duggan, really know how to shoot a kiss.) Next we cheer Desmond on in his struggle against the military establishment to be allowed to serve without a firearm.

And last, we enjoy the shallow but significant moral satisfaction of seeing him saving lives in the midst of a rubble-strewn hell, knowing he and we were right all along. Early on, Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan’s screenplay seeds Desmond’s capacity for compassion with some broad but neat moments: when his drunken father (Hugo Weaving) removes his belt it’s to thrash his sons, but when Desmond does it later, it’s to fasten it as a tourniquet around the leg of a man outside his church who’s been crushed under a car’s axle.

That sequence contains the film’s first plume of blood – a jolt at the time, but a chipped fingernail compared to the carnage that follows in Okinawa. The film’s third-act battle scenes are no mere bloodbaths but entire spa resorts of gore, horrific in their specificity (limbs are blown

to ribbons, rats and maggots gnaw on corpses) and spiritually pulverising in their scale and relentlessness.

Unlike the faceless Japanese enemy – who are little more than a howling tide of evil – the soldiers in Desmond’s unit aren’t elevated extras, but characters we’ve come to love through the extended training camp sequence that makes up much of the film’s middle section.

Desmond’s fellow soldiers have nicknames like Teach, Ghoul and Hollywood, bestowed on them by their commanding officer Sergeant Howell, played with dash and humour by Vince Vaughn in what must be his most roundly appealing performance in at least a decade.

There’s something very Australian about these barrack-room scenes, too: as in Gallipoli, the unit runs on honest mateship, and love is something the men don’t outwardly express for one another but triangulate from honesty, shared adversity and wisecracks. When they reject Desmond for his pacifist stance, it stings – and makes his eventual triumph all the sweeter.

Not that the story was light on religiosity in the first place, but Gibson doesn’t stint on Christian symbolism, bringing stigmata-like wounds, a descent beneath the earth and a sun-haloed ascension to his hero’s personal Passion on the field of battle. War is hell, but through Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson finds a way to harrow it. There’s wonderful pow’r in the blood.

Read full review at Telegraph

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This biopic will either bore you or stir you

Hacksaw Ridge is an exercise in extremes. You’ll either love it or hate it. There’s very little middle ground here. Personally, I’m going with the former option, but that’s because I’m a sucker for underdog hero stories. And that’s exactly what Hacksaw Ridge is. The way the movie is structured, with a lengthy backstory that details how he grew up, his dad’s abusive drinking, their firm faith,his resilience, his first kiss is a complete contrast to the second half — which is when the fighting begins. Chalk and cheese.

Mel Gibson has transformed the astonishing tale of Desmond Doss into a soulful drama, albeit with a good deal of his religious indulgences and political propaganda. Doss, who died in 2006, was a vet who carried over 75 injured men off the battlefield at Hacksaw Ridge, Okinawa and lowered them down the cliff face long after the troops had beaten a retreat. What makes it even more compelling is that Doss was derided and pushed around, on the verge of being court martialled, because he wouldn’t touch a gun or kill people, because his religious beliefs wouldn’t permit it.

Andrew Garfield, who played the last but one Spiderman, plays Doss with restrained ease - and is particularly emphatic during that long night when he rummaged around looking for survivors. His lines, Doss’ by way of origin, “Please God, give me the strength to save one more,” can really make you tear up.

Backed by strong performances, Vince Vaughn as Doss’ tough-as-nails Sargent in particular, Hacksaw Ridge is one of those rare movies that can move you and make you sick all at once. Sick how? Well, we’re talking Mel Gibson and war scenes. Think gore, blood spatter that’s borderline pulp and unrelenting violence, all to ensure you’re left in no doubt just how violent the skirmish was. The action is pretty high quality, though, and for people who grew up reading Commando comics, it’s a nice little throwback to WWII stories.

Could it have been a wee bit shorter? Yes. Could there have been a little less grandstanding on how the army mistreated Conscientious Objectors (that’s what people who enlisted but refused to kill were called)? Absolutely. Does that make it any less worthwhile a watch? Not in my book.

Read full review at Indian express

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Movie rating ★★★★☆

Mel Gibson finds a conscience in gruesome war story

   Andrew Garfield stars as decorated conscientious objector Desmond Doss in Gibson’s highly effective shot at a major directorial comeback

As a machine-tooled vehicle for Mel Gibson’s directorial comeback, Hacksaw Ridge couldn’t be more perfect. A study of a second world war conscientious objector who demonstrated extreme bravery under enemy fire (and won the Medal of Honor), the film allows Gibson to identify himself with a tough guy of considerable moral virtue, someone who has gone through through their own modern Calvary, taken the punishment, and come through the other side relatively unscathed. And the foundation for all this? An unswerving commitment to a little-understood corner of the Christian faith (in this case, Seventh Day Adventism), which triggers – in order – bafflement, ridicule, and finally respect.

That, presumably, is how Gibson see his own journey, which began its descent after the volley of abuse he aimed at cops in 2006 after being stopped for drink driving. That year saw the release of Apocalypto, his Mayan-language thriller; it’s taken him a decade of public humiliation, frequent apologies, and occasional forays as an actor, to get to the position where he can release another film he’s directed. And as repellent a figure as many may still find Gibson, I have to report he’s absolutely hit Hacksaw Ridge out of the park.

Mostly it’s due to the film’s extraordinary second half, in which the protagonist – US army medic Desmond Doss – takes part in the assault on Okinawa. the bloody battle in 1945 for the islands just south of Japan itself, when the war in the Pacific was entering its own dying frenzy. Gibson’s gift as a director has always been the coruscating portrayal of violent combat, imparting the viscera-knotting energy of a slasher film to the conventional matrix of the sober war film. It’s not possible to say if Hacksaw Ridge contains the most violent or gruesome combat scenes ever filmed, but let’s just say it resembles Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers without any of the satire or audience-winking.

Thus Doss (played with an unlined forehead and semi-vacant grin by Andrew Garfield) must scramble over piles of mutilated corpses, exploded skulls, and screaming wounded as he carries out his heroic deeds; though Gibson employs a battery of cinematic shock tactics and impact-maximising moves, there’s no sense that he is going overboard, or straying into exploitation territory. Though the chaos, Gibson is also able to keep the action lucid and clear, even when men are going down like ninepins.

Gibson takes the story back to Doss’ childhood and teenage years in smalltown Virginia; this passage, which takes up the film’s first half, is more obviously conventional, with Doss grappling with an angry father (Hugo Weaving), romancing his sweetheart (Teresa Palmer), and bonding with his camp mates as he undergoes basic training. (Vince Vaughn considerably enlivens proceedings as the unit’s sergeant, his natural wit taking the edge off the by-now-traditional bunkhouse sadism.) It’s during this first brush with the army that Doss’s story – and Gibson’s film – takes its distinctive turn: after harrassment and a court-martial due to his refusal to bear arms, Doss is allowed to return to his unit as a medic, and join the combat mission.

Gibson, though, is smart enough to have his film play clearly to the US’s powerful religious audience: Gibson has Doss ostentatiously into combat, and gives him a brief moment of rapture-style levitation as he is being winched to safety. (One can’t help but wonder how the same audience will process Doss’ anti-gun beliefs, and his use of the constitution to defend his refusal to fight.)

Be that as it may, Gibson is a man looking for redemption, and in this redemptive vision he may just have found it.

Read full review at The guardian

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