This propulsive crime picture appropriates the daddy-vengeance model of Taken and replaces the joyless, clinical efficiency with Mel Gibson tearing up the screen in full beardy maniac mode. It’s great fun. Gibson plays ex-con and recovering alcoholic Link, now inking the kind of people who don’t mind getting a tattoo in a trailer that looks it was rejected as a meth lab for being too squalid. His greatest regret from the wreckage of his past is the daughter he has lost touch with. Then she suddenly bursts back into his life. Lydia (Erin Moriarty) is jangling on a cocktail of drugs and she’s in deep trouble with the kind of people you don’t cross and expect to live.
Tattoos and motorbikes feature heavily in the ensuing chase, which rattles along at a decent pace. Some of the dialogue sounds a little written, though Gibson’s tendency to bellow his lines like a wounded bull elephant compensates and carries us along with the story.
