Folksy mediocrity punctuated with exceptional battle scenes

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2017)

'Hacksaw Ridge' is a deeply split movie. On the one hand there are some of the most horrifying, frankly excellent depictions of battleground carnage ever put on film. Sadly on the other, much more heavily weighted hand, there is a deeply mediocre, folksy boy goes to war movie surrounding them.
Okay, so the bad points: Mel Gibson seems to have had the attitude when making this movie that maybe his audience hasn't seen any other war films and will happily sit through every scene from every war movie ever without yawning. So we get the scenes which show our young hero finding love before going off to war (check), a fierce but sensitive sergeant (check), the training scenes (check), yada yada yada. I can only think of one moment in the whole set-up, which lasts for a good hour twenty, where Gibson used a little subtlety to transition over a beat in the movie. Our hero, Private Doss, admires his wedding ring momentarily before talking to his new wife. This little moment spares us the need of a wedding scene and moves us closer to the pay-off, the film that Gibson actually wants to show us and that we actually want to see. The movie desperately needed more moments like this. Sure, the scenes are all made competently, but there's an insufferable lack of originality for such a long set-up.
Exacerbating this mediocrity is the corny dialogue. Actually, corny isn't a strong enough word to describe just how 'gee shucks, mister' folksy, porch rocking chair hayseed the characters in this movie are. Now I'm not mocking 1940s Virginia, mostly because I just don't buy that this is what it was like. The dialogue is just plain bad and reveals a key reason why 'Apocalypto' is Gibson's best film.
The cast are fine, with only one or two stand-out performances, notably from Hugo Weaving as the alcoholic father (check!) and Luke Bracey as the training ground foe turned battlefield friend (check!).
Okay, so we finally get to Okinawa and the movie begins. The build-up to the battle is over-the-top but effective and by the time the first bullet is fired, the tension is unbearable. The battle itself is a film-making masterclass of war action. The first engagement with the Japanese in particular brilliantly balances the desire to convey the frenetic pace and chaos of the battle with the need for it to be coherent for the audience. The battle is fast and terrifying, but the editing allows us to take it in and follow the narrative of the action. This is no easy achievement and makes editor John Gilbert perhaps the only Oscar nominee from 'Hacksaw Ridge' to deserve the prize.
It's in these scenes that we become re-acquainted with the man who made 'Apocalypto', that ceaselessly energetic, kinetic movie. When his characters move, rather than talk, Gibson is capable of genuinely entrancing sequences of film, in the same league as the likes of Sam Peckinpah or George Miller.
It's a real shame that most of this movie is not these battle scenes, which are in stark contrast to the majority of the run time. It would be great if Mel Gibson could deliver us another tightly managed action epic like 'Apocalypto'. The best parts of this film, which are enough to lift the whole out of mere mediocrity, show that it was not a fluke.