4 stars
Directed By Mel Gibson
Touchstone

One big and brutally graphic bite into raw, dripping tapir testes, and I was caught somewhere between a grimace and a giggle. It was only a few minutes into Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” and never before had the epithet “ball-breath” been used quite so literally.

“Apocalypto” hits the ground running (no, really—the first glimpse of a human we get is of legs churning by on a hunt) and the vivid violence that characterizes this first kill sets the pace for the epic carnage of the rest of the film.

The screaming, pillaging rape of a village takes the protagonist, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), from a lush jungle to a stunningly depicted Mayan mecca and back again, as he tries to escape his death-happy captors. A prophecy foretells great and ominous things for him, but his most pressing thought is the rescue of his small son and very pregnant wife from the bottom of a well-cave combo where they were hiding during the sacking of their home. Luckily, nature, the fates, and his supernatural ability to rip arrows out of his torso conspire to help him thwart his own imminent immolation.

Gibson didn’t shy from gore in “Braveheart” or “The Passion of the Christ” and he certainly doesn’t here either. The moment you see a white waterfall, you know it’s only a matter of time before it is stained with red, and a cornfield just wouldn’t be a cornfield in a Gibson movie without a field of corpses behind it.

But somehow in the midst of all the carnage, Gibson manages to make a world full of bewildering, bloody beauty stunning in its scope. Aesthetically, the movie is magic—gruesome, gory magic perhaps, but powerfully depicted nonetheless. The city scenes in particular are extraordinary. The headdresses alone are worth more than their own astounding weight in cinematic gold, and the epic Mayan pyramids have never looked so outrageously good, whether in spite of or because of the heads and bodies bouncing down their infinite steps.

Implacably pierced and outfitted in jewelry ranging from precious stones to human bones, the actors and actresses that populate the screen do so beautifully, in particular the lead Rudy Youngblood. The casting, unconventional and far from stereotypical Hollywood, is impeccable, as is the decision to have the characters speaking a Mayan dialect (no worries, this, like “The Passion of the Christ,” has English subtitles). In English, the movie would be ludicrous, but in Mayan the alien words contribute to the recreation of this long gone world.

There are those that will love “Apocalypto.” There are also those that will hate it. Then, there are those, who, like me, will laugh and wince their way through this beautiful beast of movie.

Bottom Line: “Apocalypto” may prove the ultimate in sanguine cinema for those who don’t find a total tally of four still-beating hearts held aloft a petrifying prospect. But if the beauty of a blood-cloud leaves you cold, or worse, slightly ill, it may prove a far less pleasing experience.