5. “Chicken Run” (2000)
Gibson’s first major voice performance, in Disney’s minor mid-’90s misfire “Pocahontas,” was fairly forgettable, but he’s at his most charming in his second (and so far, last) voiceover work, on Aardman’s totally delightful “Chicken Run.” The first feature by the multi-Oscar winning British stop-motion studio, the film (directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord) is a riff on World War II breakout movies like “The Great Escape,” focused on a bunch of hens in a rough farm in Yorkshire. When they learn that the farmers (Miranda Richardson and Tony Haygarth) are becoming less interested in their eggs and more interested in their potential as food, the need to break out, pushed by the resourceful Ginger (Julia Sawalha), becomes more urgent. And hope arrives in the form of cockerel Rocky (Gibson), a brash, handsome American who crash lands in the farm and claims he’s able to fly. That he’s actually a stunt performer in a circus, fired out of a cannon and as flightless as they are, is something he decides to keep to himself. The film has all the ingenuity, wit and filmmaking craft of the best of Aardman’s work, but Gibson brings some real star power along for the ride, too. Unlike some vocal performances, it feels like he’s playing a real character rather than just himself, and more than any of his live-action turns, it showcases Gibson as both a comic actor and an old-school matinee idol.
4. “Ransom” (1996)
A loose remake of a 1956 Glenn Ford-starrer, “Ransom” is an atypically tough and fairly gripping thriller, given that it’s directed by Ron Howard, not exactly someone known for this sort of thing. And while genre conventions and Howard’s sentimental streak eventually overpower the smart script co-written by the great crime writer Richard Price (who’d go on to write for “The Wire,” among other credits), Gibson’s lead performance does a lot to make up for that. The star plays Tom Mullen, a self-made millionaire whose son (Brawley Nolte, the son of Nick) is kidnapped, with his captors demanding a $2 million ransom. When a drop goes wrong, Mullen turns the tables on the kidnappers, offering the money as a bounty on the kidnappers’ heads instead. The film doesn’t quite make the most of its premise, and some of the writing bears the scars of studio- or star-mandated rewrites, but there’s an intelligence and verisimilitude to the way it’s pulled off. And Gibson really is terrific, his character’s journey — from panic to desperation to steely resolve, dead-eyed grief and eventual dam-bursting relief — being what makes the movie. Try and imagine a contemporary like Tom Hanks in the role, and you’ll see how essential Gibson is to the film.
3. “Signs” (2002)
Say what you like about M. Night Shyamalan, but he’s someone that at his peak really knew how to get the most out of movie stars. He got lovely, atypically understated work out of Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable,” and for his next trick, got Gibson to pull off some of the very best work of his career in “Signs.” In a rare on-screen role that engages with his real-life faith, Gibson plays a priest who left the church after the death of his wife in a car accident, and is now living on a Pennsylvania farm with his brother (Joaquin Phoenix) and his children (Abigail Breslin and Rory Culkin). But a series of strange incidents, including the appearance of crop circles in their fields, sees the family become the focal point of a possible invasion of earth by aliens. Drawing on films like “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind,” Shyamalan delivers maybe his best-directed movie, even if the script begins to flirt with some of the silliness that would come with subsequent pictures. And Gibson really rises to the material, muting many of the the things he usually relies on to bring out the simmering rage and devastating grief inside the character, and to make his returning faith genuinely moving. It’s arguably the last appearance of Mel Gibson, Movie Star: Within a few years, first his directing work, then his personal life would end up derailing and overshadowing his acting work.
2. “Lethal Weapon” (1987)
“The Road Warrior” and “The Year Of Living Dangerously” made Gibson a star, but it was “Lethal Weapon” that vaulted him onto the A-list and made him one of the most sought-after stars around. Today, a billion buddy-buddy cop movies later, the set-up to Shane Black’s script (strongly executed by Richard Donner) couldn’t be more basic: A by-the-books, close-to-retirement cop (Danny Glover, who was just 40 when he played his “too old for this shit” character) is teamed with a renegade, violent partner to solve a murder and bring down a drugs ring run by former special-ops soldiers. That it became a megahit and took on instant-classic status is down to Donner’s crunchy action; Black’s smart, funny script; Glover’s expert straight-manning — but, more than any single other factor, it was down to Gibson. He has a tough role to play, even if you ignore his very ’80s mullet: a deeply grieving, suicidal, borderline-psychotic guy in a film that’s predominately a comedy that you know is going to hit all the established genre beats. But in Gibson’s hands, Riggs feels legitimately dangerous, someone that honestly does feel like the lethal weapon of the title — like Robin Williams in his coke phase playing Dirty Harry — and it brings a real edge that too many of its imitators never had.
1. “Mad Max” (1979)
‘Fury Road‘ might be the best of George Miller’s quartet of post-apocalyptic actioners, but with apologies to Tom Hardy, Mel Gibson is still the definitive Mad Max, and though he’s iconic across all three of the original trilogy, he might be at his best in the original. Set earlier in the collapse of civilization than the subsequent, more far-out movies, being as much neo-Western as it is science-fiction, it sees Max as a highway patrolman who’s put on a collision course with a motorcycle gang led by the psychotic Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), eventually abandoning the law, and life in society in general, when his young family are killed. It’s an admirably grimy grindhouse revenge picture, serving as something of an origin story for the character we’d later come to see in much stranger surroundings, but even as a nominally law-abiding cop in the film’s early stages, there’s something unhinged lurking underneath Max. Gibson’s often at his best when he’s playing at the very edge of sanity, and the sheer rage that’s unleashed when Max goes mad with grief by the end is something to behold. He’d morph into more of a Man With No Name-type drifter by the time of ‘Beyond Thunderdome,’ but this is Gibson’s purest go-round in the role.
Beyond that, there are some other good performances from Gibson that deserve mention as well. He’s strong in “The Bounty,” opposite Anthony Hopkins, though the film is far from a definitive take on the mutiny story; while he plays nicely opposite Kurt Russell in buddy-buddy movie “Tequila Sunrise.” His directorial debut “The Man Without A Face” sees him give a good turn under some heavy make-up; while Richard Donner’s Western reboot “Maverick” is a bit of a mess, but lets him unleash his movie-star charms in a way that few other movies did.
“Payback” is another film that was somewhat compromised, but still sees the star give a solid turn. “The Beaver” landed at the worst possible time, but for all its flaws, it has a rather daring and self-reflective turn from the actor. And most recently, “Blood Father” is a sort-of-scuzzy B-movie, “Taken” by way of “Sons Of Anarchy,” but features Gibson’s most engaged turn in a while.
And then there’s his work as a director, which showed him to be a rare movie star who’s just as effective behind the camera. “Braveheart” and “The Passion Of The Christ” have their problems, but the issues rarely come from the direction, while his best feat as a filmmaker came with “Apocalypto,” a Mayan-language actioner that’s never less than thrilling, coming across like Herzog on amphetamines.