He might have fallen on hard times and found himself signing on to pretty much any action thriller that comes his way, but Mel Gibson’s filmography is nonetheless littered with award-winning favorites, box office bonanzas, and a string of iconic movies. And yet, Blood Father of all things ranks as his most acclaimed since the early 1980s.
Despite flopping at the box office after earning less than $7 million against a $15 million budget and flying largely under the radar once it hit VOD, director Jean-François Richet’s pulse-pounding tale of revenge and retribution boasts a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than any of Gibson’s live-action credits dating all the way back to 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
Certified Fresh with an 89 percent approval rating from critics, that places it higher than the entire Lethal Weapon franchise, Braveheart, Signs, Ransom, Maverick, We Were Soldiers, Conspiracy Theory, Payback, and quite literally anything the two-time Academy Award winner has appeared in across the last 40 years with the sole exception of Chicken Run, which is coincidentally his top-rated film ever on the aggregation site.
Is it really that good, though? Well, that’s entirely up for debate, but it’s comfortably the best thing Gibson has done in at least the last decade alongside the underrated duo of Get the Gringo and Boss Level, and it’s a title that streaming subscribers can’t seem to stop revisiting.
Per FlixPatrol, the astonishingly acclaimed tale of dust, blood, and bullets has been going hell for leather on Prime Video’s global charts, making it clear that Gibson remains a draw on-demand.