'Apocalypto' is pure Mel: Violent and beautiful

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is Mad Max in the Yucatan - the tale of a strapping warrior whose life is profoundly upset by vicious marauders. Like Max Rockatansky, the 1979 role that launched Gibson to stardom, Apocalypto's fleet-footed hero spends the movie fighting capture, exacting revenge, and moving really, really fast.

Substitute verdant Meso-American jungle for post-nuclear Australian wasteland - and replace the leather biker gear and tattoos with tribal thongs and, well, tattoos - and there you go. Oh, and ratchet up the production values and special effects a thousand times or so.

Violent, visceral and exhilarating, Apocalypto - which is in the ancient Mayan tongue of Yucatec (with subtitles) and which stars Rudy Youngblood as the surrogate Mel - is incredibly beautiful. When bodies start leaping from the roiling brink of a waterfall, it is an awesome waterfall.

When citizens, who are painted a nice robin's-egg hue of blue, are laid out on a sacrificial slab to be hacked up for the gods, the temple carvings and bejeweled high priests make for an eye-popping spectacle. (When spears go flying - and find entry in the skulls of fleeing natives - some literal eye-popping ensues.)

Whatever else the controversial Gibson might be (confessed alcohol and drug abuser, accused anti-Semite, uncontested motormouth), he remains an impressive filmmaker. Like Braveheart, for which he won the best-director Oscar, and The Passion of the Christ, for which, mercifully, he wasn't nominated, Apocalypto is bloody and brutal. Even an early scene, designed to establish the collegial bonhomie of a group of hunters, centers on the gutting of a wild tapir. Behold the glistening animal heart, the liver, the testicles, ripped from the beast's still-warm body, and cradled in the hands of a bunch of guys as they jokingly trade barbs and gossip.

Apocalypto begins with a quote from Will Durant - "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within" - suggesting that Gibson has lofty things on his mind. Perhaps so, but really, while the director painstakingly re-creates the 15th-century Mayan universe, from the profligate body pierces of the populace to the limestone quarries used to build the pyramids, Apocalypto is essentially an action movie, with good guys, bad guys, and one epic chase through the lushest of rainforests.

If there are ruminations about the crumbling glory of a society, the disintegration of a great culture, they are hidden in the fronds like so many poisonous tree frogs. Yes, the priests have dispatched a sadistic band of thugs to rape and pillage outlying villages, and to return the able-bodied for slave labor and sacrifice, but Apocalypto never shows us what made Mayan civilization great to begin with, so its intra-tribal bloodshed lacks any true sense of something lost, something imploding - apart from the commune-like, happy hippie social order of Jaguar Paw's wee village.

But that does not mean that Apocalypto lacks for drama, or passion, or suspense. Youngblood, an American Indian making his first stab at screen acting, holds the camera with an animal magnetism - appropriate, since his character's name is Jaguar Paw. As the Mayan war party invades his village, friends are murdered, women are dragged off to be raped, children left standing, quaking in fear.

Unlike Mad Max, in which the hero's wife and son are killed outright, in Apocalypto Jaguar Paw's pregnant spouse, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), and young boy, Turtles Run (Carlos Emilio Baez), are abandoned in a deep hole, escape unlikely. (The son has a gash in his leg from the fall, and his mother uses ant mandibles to suture the wound. Band-Aids, who needs 'em?)

Leading the attacking Holcane warrior horde is Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo), a mighty fighter with mighty headgear (teeth, stone, beads, bone) and a troublemaking lieutenant, Snake Ink (Rodolfo Palacios) who wants nothing more than to torture and torment the prisoner Jaguar Paw. With minimal dialogue (and subtitles), Apocalypto establishes the story's characters and conflicts. The affinity between man and nature, the violence inherent in both, and the overarching possibility of a spiritual life, of destiny and divine intervention, are prominent themes.

But the heart of the matter - and the viscera - is the action, and one man's determination to survive. Apocalypto is primal.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.

Apocalypto *** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Mel Gibson and Bruce Davey, directed by Gibson, written by Gibson and Farhad Safina, photography by Dean Semler, music by James Horner, distributed by Touchstone Pictures. In Yucatec with subtitles.

Running time: 2 hours, 17 mins.

Jaguar Paw. . . Rudy Youngblood

Seven. . . Dalia Hernandez

Zero Wolf. . . Raoul Trujillo

Snake Ink. . . Rodolfo Palacios

Middle Eye. . . Gerardo Taracena

Parent's guide: R (violence, gore, nudity, adult themes)

Playing at: area theaters