If The Passion of the Christ wasn't religious, contrived or violent enough for you. Hacksaw Ridge should do the job.

Rating: 5/10 (22 February 2017)

Some reviews have said that Hacksaw Ridge is a return to form for Mel Gibson. That's sort of true, if you consider the general form of a Gibson film to be deeply violent, thrilling and devoid of any subtlety whatsoever.
Hacksaw Ridge is gripping throughout, although there is no need for the first 40 minutes of war movie cliché and small town guff. It could easily kick straight off with the incessant gore and carnage which Gibson clearly focused most of his attention on.
Once the schmaltzy build-up is over we get into the real action and the change in tone is quite brutal. During the first part of the film Andrew Garfield (as Desmond Doss) woos and marries his sweetheart, earnestly fights his way through a court martial and doggedly earns the respect of his father and his squad. Next thing you know, we're on a war ravaged Japanese island and a man is running into battle using a dismembered corpse as a human shield.
If, like me, you spent a lot of your childhood recreating or pretending to be part of various world war two battles, then brace yourself. This is the film all juvenile war perverts have been dreaming of. Bullets smash through helmets and skulls. Blokes with flame throwers strapped to their back casually stroll around incinerating everyone in their path. Blown off legs, arms and heads fly everywhere, soldiers dive onto live grenades and everyone is screaming in everyone else's bloodied and muddied face.
You get the feeling there must have been a lot of friendly fire in chaotic battles like this but Hacksaw Ridge is not the film to broach such sensitive subjects. Instead its unashamed mission is to show us writhing bodies and flapping bloodied stumps in as real and graphic a way as modern technology will allow. It's gory, unnecessary and certainly ridiculous but it is also engrossing and incredibly well shot. Nevertheless, as the violence and trauma hits hard and fast in the second half, there is no corresponding increase in depth or meaning. In many ways this is exactly the type of war film which Tropic Thunder made fun of so well.
The Japanese soldiers (or rather the 'gooks, dinks and goddam Japs') are unquestionably the bad guys here, almost as though they have become Mel's new Jews. They are screaming, monstrous, sneaky little bastards and they get treated as such by the invading soldiers. Even the wounded Japanese, brought to safety by the pacifist medic and hero of the film Doss, 'don't make it' (i.e. they get snuffed out by the other American soldiers without a hint of remorse).
There is no real contemplation of the other side of things in Hacksaw Ridge. Towards the end of the film a Japanese general accepts defeat and nobly performs hari-kari. Even this seems included only to show some more CGI guts being spilled, this time by blade rather than by bullet. In this way, Hacksaw Ridge demonstrates not only the awfulness of war but also how it can be used as a free license for almost pornographic levels of violence in the name of 'honouring history'.
Whether or not all veterans would be happy with this depiction of the mass slaughter and trauma they endured, recreated so gratuitously in High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound (and, as a result, raking in big cash at the box office), is maybe a worthy question. But then again, who cares about such considerations when you get to see a man carrying a flamethrower explode into a massive ball of fire. Why not 3D Mel?
Despite the remarkable true story of medic Desmond Doss, and its connotations of courage and selflessness in the wake of real life horror, Hacksaw Ridge contains a lot of comedic lines and cheap jump scares. There is little of the sadness and quiet reflection of Saving Private Ryan or even Flags of our Fathers.
Maybe this is a film for its own time. Glossy, brash, aggressive and with little depth. A potential Oscar winner representative of the new Trump era.