The controversial 2006 movie Mel Gibson can’t stand: “It refutes everything I hold sacred”
Obviously, not many people are going to shed any tears over Mel Gibson being upset and offended by a movie, since the fallen star has caused more than his fair share of controversy over the years.
That’s not necessarily restricted to his notorious, career-killing outburst or the misdemeanour battery charge that completely torpedoed his standing in mainstream Hollywood, either; the two-time Academy Award winner has been spouting questionable opinions since his days on the industry’s A-list.
If anything, it’s ironic that an actor and filmmaker who has repeatedly upset and offended several groups, whether it’s due to the cloud of antisemitism that’s followed him for decades, the homophobic remarks he made decades ago, or that time he admitted he fired a female business partner because she was, in his words, “a cunt”, was left clutching his pearls at a blockbuster motion picture helmed by one of the least offensive people in the business.
Not to leap to Gibson’s defence, but he was hardly the only person left up in arms by Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code. The nicest man in the business made himself some very powerful enemies when he agreed to adapt Dan Brown’s bestselling novel for the big screen, with the entire Tom Hanks-led trilogy placing him in the crosshairs of the Catholic Church, which made it their mission to thwart his shooting schedule.
Of course, the Braveheart and Lethal Weapon headliner has some strong Christian beliefs of his own, which he used to make himself an absolute fortune when he self-funded The Passion of the Christ when every major studio in town said no, leaving him rolling in cash when it became the highest-grossing R-rated release in cinema history.
The Da Vinci Code was clearly a work of fiction, and not even a particularly good one at that, but because of its content, which saw Hanks and his luxurious mane uncovering that Mary Magdalene herself was the Holy Grail, and that she and Jesus Christ were married and had children, with their bloodline surviving to the modern day, true believers were not exactly thrilled.
There were calls for a boycott, protests, and the picture was banned in numerous countries, which did fuck all to stop it from becoming the second-top-earning film of 2006, behind only Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, with a box office haul of $760 million underlining that, under the right circumstances, controversy really does create cash.
However, Gibson, the son of a high-profile conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier, wasn’t best pleased. “It refutes everything I hold sacred, the foundations of my beliefs,” he raged. “The Da Vinci Code is an admitted work of fiction, but it cleverly weaves fact into maverick theories in a way that will appear plausible to some.”
Admittedly, he wasn’t the only man of faith who felt that way, but since this is also the same Mel Gibson who was adamant that a secret cabal of shadowy figures has been pulling the strings of geopolitical power from the background, hand-picking presidents decades before they’re elected, maybe he should have been more open to Howard’s movie applying some creative licence.
