Blood Father – movie review

Carrying shades of Sicario and Payback, Mel Gibson returns to the big screen in the action-thriller Blood Father as Link, an ex-con who has done all manner of bad things, but is now wanting to turn his life around.  With an ex-wife who doesn’t want to talk to him and a daughter he’s lost touch with, Link – an reformed alcoholic with a sponsor – is eking out a meager existence as a tattoo artist in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere. It’s a city in itself, exclusively made up of blue-collar workers who became dropouts because of the economic downturn. That is when Link’s past catches up with him.

His daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty) – whose photo was captured on a missing persons report when she was 14 – is now 17 and in a whole heap of trouble. Out of nowhere and scared out of her wits, she reaches out to her father in a phone call. She has got in with a bad mob, a very, very bad mob, who want her dead after a drug deal that went horribly wrong and she can’t turn to the police. Now only her father has any hope of protecting her … and only he will, no matter what it may cost him.

Blood Father is scripted by Straight Outta Compton’s Andrea Berloff and The Town’s Peter Craig (based upon his novel) and directed by Jean-François Richet (Assault on Precinct 13). While the book is a coming of age story about the girl, the movie script only deals with the last part of the novel and is all about Gibson as a liberating character.

Richet says all his life, Link has been taking blows – he even goes to jail to protect his “adoptive father”. He questions what Link has got out of it and the answer is nothing. “To save his daughter, to make up for his absence, to give her the joy of living, he frees himself through violence. So violence becomes liberating.”

Gibson plays grizzled well (you could reasonably argue he is ideally suited to this role) and I also appreciated the innocent beauty behind Lydia, who was clearly in way over her head. There is a sweetness about Erin Moriarty’s performance, notwithstanding the mayhem all around her character. William H. Macy also plays a small but noteworthy role as Gibson’s best mate and AA mentor, Kirby. The bad dudes are typically nasty to the core, but this is a film about degrees of bad because everyone is broken.

The momentum is set in the opening scene and carried forward throughout the rest of the movie. In terms of plot development, this will never end well, but it becomes a question of redemption or futility?  Rated MA, Blood Father is a gritty male-oriented crowd-pleaser that scores a 6½ to 7 out of 10.

Director: Jean-François Richet
Cast: Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, Diego Luna, Michael Parks
Release Date: 1 September 2016
Rating: MA 15+

Alex First