Evidently Mel Gibson is in it only for the barbarity. Scouring the globe, roaming the pages of history, he has alighted here on the illuminating example of the Mayan people, past their civilized peak, where a happy, peaceable, practical-joking tribe of jungle dwellers (sample joke: the prescription of a red-hot herb as a topical fertility drug, so that the duped hubby must, in full view of the guffawing villagers, hop around buck naked and plunk down his burning loins in a water trough -- wait, it gets even better -- and his wife must pour a pitcher of water down her gullet) is cruelly set upon and rounded up by a storm troop of fearsome, bloodthirsty, bone-in-the-nose killjoys in search of sacrificial offerings to their god Kukulkan. A paradise, in other words, no less than turn-of-the-13th-century Scotland in Braveheart or 1st-century Palestine in The Passion of the Christ, where Gibson may indulge his appetite for mayhem, persecution, torture, martyrdom. (The nine-tenths-naked natives enable him, further, to indulge his lesser appetite for homoerotica.) The English subtitles and the no-name cast might almost lead you to believe, were it not for the telltale slickness and the Gibsonian slo-mo for dramatic stress, that you're watching a product of, say, the Guatemalan New Wave or the Undiscovered Belizean Cinema. At the very least, the film should do nothing to fan the flames of Gibson's suspected and substantiated anti-Semitism. And at the next least, the last-minute arrival on the scene of Christianity is not openly -- and politically incorrectly -- applauded. That might be the film's one and only instance of restraint. Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Bird. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd