Saved by Private Doss

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2017)

If you see the trailers of this film it does not even to tell you who made this film. Instead you are told that it is from the Oscar winning director of Braveheart. It shows how much the Mel Gibson name is mud in some quarters.
This is the first English language film directed by Gibson since Braveheart which was released in 1995. It is also notable that this film was made in Gibson's adopted homeland of Australia, the country his father relocated to in order that his older children would not be drafted to the Vietnam war. The film features many notable Australian actors.
Hacksaw Ridge based on true events tells the story of army medic Desmond Doss who refused to hold a gun in battle but saves the lives of many of his comrades.
The opening of the film is more hackneyed ridge than hacksaw. Doss father is an alcoholic who also seems to be suffering shell shock from The Great War, Desmond as a boy nearly kills his brother and then he vows to stick to the commandment 'thou shalt not kill.' The older Desmond (Andrew Garfield) finds romance with a nurse but after Pearl Harbour enlists to join the army but because of his beliefs as a conscientious objector, Doss intends to serve as a combat medic. At basic training Sergeant Howell (Vince Vaughn) does the usual clichéd spiel of getting the raw recruits battle ready. Gibson is in on the joke as he has Garfield grinning throughout it all.
Doss excels in his training but becomes an outcast when he refuses to handle his rifle and train on Saturdays as he is a Seventh-day Adventist. After Howell and his superiors fail to get Doss discharged for psychiatric reasons, Howell turns his fellow soldiers against him by making Doss out to be a coward.
The film comes to life in the Battle of Okinawa. Gibson delivers a gory, violent fuelled, blood, guts and rats battle sequence where Doss goes about saving the lives of the injured soldiers. Doss considers whether this is his true purpose and why he is here.
However despite the battle action being well staged, it has to be remembered that Spielberg got here almost twenty years ago in Saving Private Ryan.
The film really suffers from a corny beginning and some parts of the script is pedestrian with the romance part certainly being cringe inducing. It is the battle segments that belatedly save the film but even then some of that gets silly such as one soldier holds a dead body as a shield in one arm, walks and fires a gun with the other or where Doss drags Howell in a makeshift sledge while Howells fires off his rounds.