I kid: leading man Mel Gibson’s much-exposed propensity for sleazy scumbaggery has no basis on the quality of “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” just as it shouldn’t. The case was the same for Jodie Foster’s 2011 directorial effort “The Beaver,” a peculiar comedy-drama which saw Gibson attempting to redeem his scandalous, career-demolishing remarks by sliding his hand up the backside of a furry forest critter - a puppet one, I might add. Gibson was decent there and he is equally decent in “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” only here he has the pleasure of being decent in a film with the quality to match. If only the title matched too.
In “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” Gibson is playing a man with no name, one of two curious nudges to Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy - the other is a cruddy Clint Eastwood impression by Gibson three-quarters way through the film that somehow manages to convince a clueless fat cat that he is indeed the “Dirty Harry” star. With no name given, we shall simply call Gibson’s character “the Gringo,” which is what many of the other characters featured in the film refer to him as, much as he tells them otherwise: the names Reginald T. Barnes and Richard “Dick” Johnson are presumably of his own invention.
The Gringo is a career-criminal and a thief, but a lovable one. Having just stolen millions of dollars worth in cash from a ruthless crime boss, he speeds along the US-Mexican border in a getaway car with his partner in crime bleeding to death in the backseat and with the American forces in hot pursuit. The car smashes through the metal border wall and crashes onto Mexican soil, and the Gringo is taken into custody by crooked Mexican Federales, who eye the stolen loot and claim it all for themselves. I should note that all of this is completed while the Gringo and his dying partner are inexplicably sporting curly-fro’d rubber clown masks.
The Gringo is thrown into prison without a trial, but not just any old prison: the infamous El Pueblito, which isn’t so much a penitentiary as it is a guarded shanty town with a buzzing cesspool of a community. This place is a marvel. It is a prison in which the inmates freely wander about with drugs, knives and guns in their possession. They can buy soft drinks and booze, visit taco stands and sit in restaurants, rent makeshift beds and get a tattoo. There are even whole families living in here, with toddlers shuffling past convicted murderers and thieves on a daily basis. Indeed, if it wasn’t for all the trigger-happy security guards surrounding the area, you wouldn’t even notice it was a prison. As the Gringo’s frequently amusing, sizzlingly sardonic narration questions upon entry, “Is this a prison or the world’s shittiest shopping mall?”
At first, the Gringo smartly keeps his head down; surely a gringo wouldn’t last very long in a Mexican prison, let alone El Pueblito, with their head up. He befriends a nameless 10-year-old boy (Kevin Hernandez, one of the few highlights of “The Sitter”), a streetsmart, potty-mouthed, cigarette-puffing urchin staying in El Pueblito with his incarcerated mother (Dolores Heredia), a kindly ex-drug dealer gone straight. The Gringo discovers this kid is in trouble: Javi (Daniel Gimenez Cacho, “We Are What We Are”), a Tony Montana wannabe at the top of the prison’s food chain, is in desperate need of a liver transplant, and the kid is the only blood type match in the whole joint.
For vaguely stated reasons, the Gringo assigns himself as the kid’s loyal protector. This is one of two excuses for the film’s sudden bursts of ferocious action. The other excuse revolves around the stolen loot, which two bumbling Federales are spending willy-nilly and which the rightful owner, San Diego crime boss Frank (Peter Stormare, “Lockout”), wishes to have back. The Gringo also lets slip word of the loot to Javi’s men, which may result in the Gringo receiving a Get Out of Jail Free card.
This is where things get mighty complicated, as more and more players become embroiled in the battle to bag the loot, including the Gringo’s seedy lawyer, Bill (Dean Norris, “Breaking Bad”). And with this, the plot becomes increasingly convoluted and decreasingly comprehensible. As the film came to its second half, I would be lying if I were to say I fully understood all that I was viewing. Luckily, a tightly structured script and a consistent entertainment value manage to compensate for a lack of narrative cohesion - there’s one thing “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” is most definitely not, and that is boring.
The film marks the directorial debut of Adrian Grunberg, a former second-unit and first-assistant director whose work on Tony Scott’s “Man on Fire” and Gibson’s “Apocalypto” was simply staggering. His directorial work is to a similar degree, capturing the world of El Pueblito, the real star of the show, with a greasy, immersive grit, and cinematographer Benoît Debie (“Enter the Void”) painting it with a cigar-stained colour palette. Working with editor Steven Rosenblum (“Braveheart”), Grunberg makes his action fast, grungy and splattered with blood. Sometimes it is heart-breaking and sometimes it is harrowing, and sometimes it parades a demented sense of humour: a high-stakes shootout in the centre of the prison culminates with the Gringo skillfully swinging a live grenade back at its thrower.
What’s not so skillful is Grunberg’s handling of tone; “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” frequently leaps back and forth between solemn drama, dark comedy and nutso action, with mixed results. The Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino, if I may make a possibly unfair comparison, are supremely talented in the art of connecting such diverse genres and blending them into one coherent film, and I believe “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” was an attempt at such a thing. Unfortunately, the effect isn’t seamless enough to quite pull the whole thing off, but it gets by on a persistent exploitation sensibility and the commanding screen presence of its leading man.
As shameless anti-hero the Gringo, Gibson is at his charismatic best. It is through this nameless character that Gibson, who is also the film’s producer and co-writer, advisedly channels the characters that helped launch his career: Sergeant Martin Riggs in “Lethal Weapon" and Max Rockatansky in “Mad Max," only here he is sitting firmly on the opposite end of the law. In spite of his fierce criminal mindset, the Gringo is a strangely endearing character and protagonist, fitted with a slyly manipulative, irresistibly roguish personality and a smart alec attitude: from the moment we see him stuffing cigarettes in his ears to drown out the noise of a mariachi band, we are with him all the way to the finishing line.
“How I Spent My Summer Vacation” is a curious concoction indeed. Part hard-boiled prison drama and part modern-day spaghetti western, it is a film that features, among various other ingredients, the severing of human toes, gross Mexican stereotypes, forced organ harvesting and one of the strangest prison settings I have ever seen in my life. It is a violent romp and a B-movie of excess, and in those regards it is very successful. And while it may not be enough for us to forgive Gibson for his real-life personal problems, it is enough for us to forgive him for starring in “The Beaver.”
7/10
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