Film Review: How I Spent My Summer Vacation (15) Director: Adrian Grunberg Running time: 95 minutes HOW does Mel Gibson spend his summer vacation? Drinking Lindsay Lohan under the table, or heckling a revival of Fiddler On The Roof? Checking out of the Betty Ford clinic for alcoholism, or checking into the Henry Ford Clinic for anti-Semitism? Several very public meltdowns have established Gibson as a man who carries baggage, even when he's got no particular place to go. It also makes you wonder what demons Mad Mel is exorcising when he plays his flinty avengers on screen. Not that he has the opportunity to play anything but intensely choleric personalities at the moment. Would you buy a ticket to watch Gibson in a romantic comedy right now? Or a puppy-friendly Disney film? In America, How I Spent My Summer Vacation was renamed Get The Gringo and despatched to cable TV without troubling cinemas. Such clothes-peg-on-nose distribution, along with a distinct absence of any star name prepared to support Gibson on his vacation, indicates that his box office appeal doesn't carry much lustre these days. How I Spent My Summer Vacation was co-written by its star with a degree of self-awareness of this, and the basic need of his remaining fanbase to see a grim Gibson in a high-speed car chase across the Mexican border, getting arrested by local police, having his ill-gotten loot confiscated, and being thrown into El Pueblito: less a prison, more a gated community for hardened criminals. Inmates are allowed to bring their families to live in this shanty town of shops, houses and drug dens. "You can buy anything here," explains one character, "except your way out." Or a colour palette that isn't orange or yellow, since director Adrian Grunberg shoots through a filter that makes everything look as if it has been rinsed in urine. Pulpy action ensues as Mel gets to know his new neighbours, including El Pueblito's mayor, a drug lord (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) with a rare blood type and a failing liver. The perfect donor - whether he agrees to it or not - is a ten-year-old boy (Kevin Hernandez) who lives with his drug mule mother (Dolores Heredia). Inevitably, kid and mom forge a tentative bond with Gibson's laconic, nameless Driver. Indeed, in terms of palatability, the Driver on screen is a far less tricky prospect than the Actor off-camera. After all, his implacable amorality is no more than skin deep, and his victims are even more hard-boiled than he is, so they deserve what they get. What I Did On My Summer Vacation has all the freshness you'd expect of something stitched from the body parts of other movies. In particular, it's awfully reminiscent of Gibson's 1999 hit Payback, which also pitted Gibson against corrupt cops, kingpins of crime and beefy goons with the same generic self-consciousness. Both even offer a sequence where something agonising is inflicted on someone's toes. Yet although Vacation doesn't have much narrative ingenuity, the big screen still adores Gibson, with his gravelly voice and, nowadays, face. It's one of those guilty pleasure flicks often assigned to Jason Statham, although for all his likeability, the Stat wouldn't manage the kind of heavy lifting required to elevate Vacation. Gibson is quirkier; lighter on his feet and more compelling. He knows how to flip a line into fleeting comic relief, and he can make a shapeless movie appear taut.