Weekend Double Feature: Mel Gibson Movies

Welcome to the Fancast Weekend Double Feature! Free movies, free fun, and you’ve got the best seat in the house - your house. Sit back, relax and take in some classic movies.

Mel Gibson has run the gamut of international sex symbol, action-comic genius, Academy Award winning director, ugly scandalous drunkard and relative recluse. Through the magic of the movies, we can go back to the before time, the long long ago, and remember the days when he wasn’t the last two things. First up this weekend is Mad Max, the apocalyptic road warrior movie that first made Gibson a name. Then we follow it up with The Bounty, an adventure at sea wherein he stars as Fletcher Christian, leading a mutiny against Lt. William Bligh, as played by Sir Anthony Hopkins.

But first, check out some Coming Attractions!

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Mad Max

Mad Max remains one of Gibson’s most famous and beloved characters, likely moreso than Lethal Weapon’s Martin Riggs and even Braveheart’s William Wallace. It’s the movie that launched Gibson to fame, and he repaid that favor by starring in its sequels, The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and rumors remain that a fourth movie is in the works.

It’s the not-too-distant future, and society is deteriorating rapidly, and it’s gotten harder and harder for Main Force Patrol to maintain order, especially with a berserk motorcycle gang led by a man named Toecutter wreaking havoc all over the Australian outback. When MFP’s top pursuit man Max Rockatansky and his partner Jim Goose get involved with trying to bring these bastards down, the legal system fails them, Goose gets burnt alive, and Max quits the MFP out of fear that he’ll become just as savage and violent as Toecutter’s horde. That is, until that gang tracks down his wife Jessie and her son, running them down like animals in the middle of the road. This is what drives Max truly Mad, and once that line is crossed, all bets are off.

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The Bounty

The story of the 1789 mutiny aboard a Royal Navy ship known as the H.M.S. Bounty is an oft-told tale, but in Roger Donaldson’s version, Lt. William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) is not the sadistic villain he is often portrayed as, but rather a man driven to harsh discipline and extreme measures in the face of his crew growing ever more lax after an extended stay in the hedonistic culture of Tahiti. Gibson described this version of Bligh thusly: “It was a kind of fresh look at Captain Bligh, and I think of all the renditions of who Bligh was, his was probably the closest. His Bligh was stubborn and didn’t suffer fools, but he was brilliant and just had a lot of bad luck.” Gibson’s own character of Fletcher Christian, however, isn’t quite the stalwart hero rebelling against Bligh’s tyranny, either. Donaldson wanted to depict the fact that Bligh and Christian had actually been friends with a history together, and Bligh had promoted Christian to second-in-command before the young man had really deserved it. Gibson put it this way: “Fletcher was just a lad of twenty-two and he behaved like one. The first time he decided to test his horns and fight for the herd, it was a mistake. He shouldn’t have done it.” Hardly the standard hero vs. villain story one might’ve expected.

The Bounty has a fantastic supporting cast as well. In fact, one can hardly imagine being more ably supported in a film than you could be by Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, Bernard Hill and Sir Laurence Olivier. That’s right, this film boasts two knights. There’s no reason not to watch this film, which Roger Ebert called “a wonderful movie, high-spirited and intelligent, but something of a production triumph as well.”

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