Mel flays our finer feelings alive

"I'm going to peel off his skin and make him watch me wear it." This grisly threat is delivered by one of the main bad guys in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. The promised flaying never takes place, but viewers who share this director's apparently limitless appetite for gore will not be disappointed, since not much else in the way of bodily torment has been left to the imagination. There are plenty of disembowelings, impalings, clubbings and beheadings. Hearts are torn, still beating, from slashed-open chests. A man's face is chewed off by a jaguar. Another's neck is pierced by darts tipped with frog venom. Most disturbing, perhaps, is the sight of hundreds of corpses haphazardly layered in an open pit: a provocative and ill-advised excursion into Holocaust imagery on this director's part.

Violence has become the central axiom in Gibson's practice as a filmmaker, his major theme and also his chief aesthetic interest. The brutality in Apocalypto is so relentless and extreme that it sometimes moves beyond horror into a kind of grotesque comedy, but to dismiss it as excessive or gratuitous would be to underestimate Gibson's seriousness. And say what you will about him — about his problem with booze or his problem with Jews — he is a serious filmmaker.

Which is not to say that Apocalypto is a great film, or even that it can be taken quite as seriously as it wants to be. Gibson's technical command has never been surer; for most of its 138-minute running time, Apocalypto, written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia, is a model of narrative economy, moving nimbly forward and telling its tale with clarity and force. It is, above all, a muscular and kinetic action movie, a drama of rescue and revenge with very little organic relation to its historical setting. Yes, the dialogue is in various Mayan dialects, which will sound at least as strange to American ears as the Latin and Aramaic of The Passion of the Christ, but the film's real language is Hollywood's, and Gibson's, native tongue.

When I first heard about this project, and later when I saw the early trailers, I halfway hoped that Gibson might turn out to be an American (or half-Australian) version of Werner Herzog, setting out into the jungle to explore the dark and tangled regions of human nature. Once you get past the costumes and the subtitles, though, the most striking thing about Apocalypto is how comfortably it sits within the conventions of mainstream moviemaking. It is not an obsessive opera like Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God, but rather a pop period epic in the manner of Gladiator or Braveheart, and as such less interested in historical or cultural authenticity than in imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.

The setting is Central America before the arrival of the Spanish, when the Maya empire, in Gibson's version, was already in the process of collapsing from within. The basic moral conflict — as it was in Braveheart, directed by and starring Gibson, and in The Patriot, a vehicle for him directed by Roland Emmerich — is between a small group of people trying to live simple, decent, traditional lives and a larger, more powerful political entity driven by bloodlust and greed. This kind of conservative anti-imperialism runs consistently through Gibson's work; whether the empire in question is Roman, British or Mesoamerican, and whatever its political resonance might be, it allows the viewer to root for an unambiguously virtuous underdog.