Blood Father (2016)

Blood Father arrives with an unlikely pedigree: a French production, directed by Jean-François Richet, adapted by Peter Craig from his own 2005 novel, premiered at Cannes, and shot in Albuquerque on what appears to be a modest budget. It stars Mel Gibson as John Link, a paroled ex-convict and recovering alcoholic living in a trailer, whose estranged daughter Lydia surfaces with a dead boyfriend, a stolen pile of cartel money, and a gang of armed men behind her. The remainder is a chase, punctuated by gunfire, a landmine, and a motorcycle. The film knows exactly what it is and does not apologize for it.

The cast places several Latino performers in cartel and gang roles, among them Diego Luna, Miguel Sandoval, Richard Cabral, and Raoul Trujillo. This is the standard furniture of the borderland crime picture, inhabited competently and without commentary. The film has no interest in interrogating the structures that produce its villains. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental concern, no body positivity, no neurodivergent character, and no critique of capital. The criminals want money because they are criminals. Lydia survives, gets sober, and speaks at a support group one year later, but her function is to be rescued by a father seeking redemption, and the film never pretends otherwise.

The recovery material, confined to a handful of Alcoholics Anonymous exchanges and a closing testimonial, brushes against a moral without delivering one. Nobody stops the action to explain the lesson. For a 2016 release, this is a notably unadorned specimen, and the classification is correspondingly lean. We assign it low marks across the board and move on to the next screening. There is something almost restful about a film this indifferent to the cultural currents of its moment, though restful is not the same as commendable. It is simply a man on a motorcycle, a daughter in peril, and a desert. Our work here is done, and it was brief work indeed. We note the runtime, log the scores, and reach for the next screener with the weary diligence that this calling demands of us, week after week, without complaint and without end. The ledger closes. The trailer door shuts. Somewhere, a support group meets in a church basement, and nobody in it is thinking about representation at all, which is, in its own small way, a kind of honesty. We mark it down and move along. The next film awaits, and it will almost certainly have opinions.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}