Apocalypto avoids a common trap that modern treatments of ancient cultures often fall into: portraying them overly reverently, as sober, deep, and rather bland and humorless. Unfortunately, Gibson has wandered too far on the other side, thrusting upon ancient Mayans the locker-room man-boy humor most often associated with low budget sitcoms and ’80s frat-boy flicks. It is fairly obvious that Gibson’s goal with his latest work was not to paint a picture of Mayan life and culture, but to make a modern chase movie set in ancient Central America, subtitles and all. It’s one thing to hear raunchy humor in English; it’s quite another to hear it in Yucatec and then see it printed in English across the bottom of the screen.

The story itself, while not unique or particularly believable, is not the weakest part of the film. A small tribe is ravaged by a larger, more violent tribe, and the survivors are captured and taken to the Mayan center of civilization as either slaves or sacrifices. One man, Jaguar Paw, escapes, and the rest of the movie centers on his desperate flight back to his village in hopes of finding his pregnant wife and young son still alive in the cistern where he hid them during the initial attack.

It could have been a noble storyline, really, but wildly out-of-place and terrifically inappropriate comic relief peppers the entire film. Just when I thought I could take the movie seriously, Gibson would break the intensity with a single dry morsel of (usually raunchy) comedy. Again, not to elevate ancient cultures “above” such humor, but the placement of these comic breaks was seriously disorienting, if not occasionally mildly offensive.

Case in point: during the chase segment, five men are pursuing Jaguar Paw through the thick jungle when one is bitten in the face by a poisonous snake. The four survivors look at each other with that silent, wide-eyed Mom’s-gonna-kill-us-when-she-finds-out expression, until one breaks the silence with a curt Yucatec phrase, translated (precisely, I’m sure) as “He’s f***ed.” Cue audience laughter and inability to take the next twenty minutes of the film at all seriously. Similarly, while the violence is, I’m sure, realistic and pertinent to the culture, it seemed over-emphasized to the point of being gratuitous. (Really, we only need to see one of the human sacrifices in all its detail to get the point; Gibson offers two, which, from my perspective, diminishes the barbarity of it, rather than accentuates it. The first pass generates the requisite shock; the second pass is sheer gratuitousness.)

Cinematically, the film is decently shot, though a few of the special effects moments are embarrassingly poor (particularly the obviously stuffed jaguar that never closes its mouth as it attacks, and strikes more like a reptile than a feline). However, there are a few jungle scenes which are beautifully captured. And again, the story itself might have made a decent edge-of-your-seat chase movie if the intensity hadn’t been constantly interrupted by Tourette’s-inspired outbursts. As my husband noted, it was similar to watching Mel Gibson in the first Lethal Weapon installment, where he suddenly breaks free from ferocious sanity for a moment and begins a Three-Stooges-In-One routine. Not exactly what we expect from the ancient Mayans.

In short, I found the movie less than engaging, and more than bewildering. I had been hoping for a glimpse into the Mayan culture, a sort of jungle version of Braveheart, perhaps (he did, at least, include the blue body paint); instead I saw an improbable, poorly told story in which the setting had very little, if any, connection to the story itself.

Apocalypto is rated R “for sequences of graphic violence and disturbing images.” No mention of stupid sexual humor? The violence alone merits an R rating, as the torture and sacrifice scenes are certainly disturbing to watch. The sexual humor is rather crude as well, but if you can stomach the blood, the raunchiness probably won’t faze you.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jenn attended a promotional screening of Apocalypto.