Directed by Mel Gibson
Written by Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer, Luke Bracey, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Ben O’Toole, Richard Roxburgh, Helmut Bakaitis, Bill Young, James Mackay, Ori Pfeffer, Matt Nable
Soundtrack: Rupert Gregson-Williams
So much for a triumphant return for Mel Gibson the director.
I was rooting for this movie. As a reviewer, anytime you come across a film that’s based on an amazing story like this one, you want to be able to enthusiastically recommend it, and it’s especially painful when you feel you can’t.
To be clear, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is not a bad movie. It’s certainly miles ahead of ‘Unbroken’ (which was an utter debacle) as far as true life adaptations go, but I hesitate to call it great, and it’s a long, long way from being “the best war movie since ‘Saving Private Ryan'” (that title likely goes to ‘Fury‘). In some ways, it’s fair to compare ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ to Gibson’s last directorial effort, ‘Apocalypto’, which is an incredible movie, but it’s so brutal that you only want to watch it once; the difference is that overall, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is a lesser film than ‘Apocalypto’, because all that really matters in ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is the last forty-five minutes.
That’s right; as expected, once the movie gets to Okinawa, it largely becomes the epic we expect, but there are a number of issues before we get there.
First of all, much of the movie suffers from a general lack of connective tissue from scene to scene, and I’m not just talking about establishing time and place (I had similar frustrations with ‘Bridge of Spies‘), but also establishment of characters and relationships. Quite simply, there are times when the movie is like a book with random pages missing.
In addition, and this might sound slightly xenophobic, but I don’t really care, the movie was shot entirely in Australia, which is fine (Lord knows I have plenty of friends from down under), especially given that so much of the movie takes place in the Pacific theater of World War II, but, an Australian-shot movie like this means a lot of Australian actors, which is fine, except they’re all playing Americans (in fact, I think Vince Vaughn is the only real American in the whole cast), which sends us headlong into hazy accent territory. Oftentimes when a non-American actor plays an American role, they’re given a specific American accent rather than a more neutral one in order to mitigate the differences (usually a Southern accent, e.g. ‘Black Hawk Down’). Sometimes it works to the actors’ advantage, but in the case of ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ I felt like so many people were merely playing the accent rather than playing actual roles that I had a hard time connecting with the characters (and yes, this applies to Andrew Garfield as well, despite his talent). I guess it goes to show that you can’t rely on “Based of a True Story” to make characters feel real by default; you have to put the same work in as any other kind of movie to bring these people to life.
Lastly, many of the non-battle scenes (especially basic training) feel sanitized in comparison to the second half of the movie. To put it another way, compared to ‘The Pacific‘, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ often feels like a cartoon.
However, as I said, these deficiencies are largely made up for once the film at last gets to Okinawa, when we finally get to see the beautifully shot ballet of unfathomable brutality play out before us.
‘Hacksaw Ridge’ might not be a great film, but it’s worth seeing once simply based on the strength of the real-life story (although maybe don’t pay full price for it).
Rating: ★★★☆☆