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Mel Gibson may be a religious loon, but he knows how to make a movie

HACKSAW RIDGE (Mel Gibson). 139 minutes. Opens Friday (November 4). See Listings. Rating: NNN


Mel Gibson’s career rehabilitation tour continues with Hacksaw Ridge, a tale of wartime heroism marking the disgraced Oscar winner’s first di­rectorial effort since 2006’s brawny survival thriller, Apocalypto.

It’s also his first explicitly Christian narrative since The Passion Of The Christ, which forces us to confront the icky reality that Gibson is both a gifted filmmaker and, well, a delusional zealot.

Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of Desmond Doss (a wet-eyed Andrew Garfield), a Seventh Day Adven­tist who enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Second World War as a conscientious objector, served as a medic and saved dozens of soldiers during a hellish battle at Okinawa.

Gibson introduces Doss as the purest of men: the long-suffering son of a traumatized First World War vet (Hugo Weaving), he’s quick to help others in peril, which leads him to meet (and fall for) fresh-faced nurse Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer). All would be well, but when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Doss enlists as a conscientious objector since his beliefs won’t let him violate the sabbath or kill.

Cut to basic training, where Doss’s refusal to pick up a rifle leaves him despised by his fellow GIs, tormented by his drill sergeant (Vince Vaughn, surprisingly great in a generic role) and court-martialled by a military that can’t deal with his pacifism.

Since the movie opens with a shot of Doss in combat, this opening movement – which plays out over almost an hour – feels awfully unnec­essary – we know he’s going to survive these trials and go to war. But to Gibson, the trials are the point: he’s telling a story of faith being tested and can’t help underlining each station of the metaphorical cross.

And then, of course, it’s time for the greatest trial of all, when Doss is thrown into the Pacific theatre for an orgy of gore-soaked battlefield death that’s as potent as anything Gibson’s made in the past, until it tips over into numbing repetition. (We Were Soldiers, the 2002 Vietnam picture starring Gibson and directed by Randall Wallace, had a similar bloodthirsty monotony.)

The faith-based aspects of the narrative are underplayed with surprising elegance, though it’s easy to in­ter­pret the principled Doss as a stand-in for Gibson, who sees himself as a noble truth-teller in an industry that would rather he just shut up and go away.

But Doss’s publicly professed beliefs are rather different from Gibson’s, and that’s a disconnect Hacksaw Ridge has clearly preferred not to address.

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