Every Single Thing About Mel Gibson’s Puerto Rico Hurricane Heist Movie Trailer Is Infuriating

The trailer for a new Mel Gibson movie dropped this week and if you’re saying to yourself “But I don’t need or want a new Mel Gibson movie,” just wait because the levels of what no one needs or wants are about to go so much deeper.

Force of Nature stars Mel Gibson (already a problem) and Emile Hirsch (also a problem!) alongside Kate Bosworth and Dexter’s David Zayas in a heist movie set during a Category 5 hurricane in Puerto Rico. Of those four lead actors, Zayas, the only one who is Puerto Rican, also looks to be the villain.

Here’s the official synopsis of what Lionsgate insists is “a perfect storm of action”:

As disgraced cop Cardillo (Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild) races to evacuate an apartment building, he comes across Dr. Troy (Kate Bosworth, Superman Returns) and her retired detective father, Ray (Mel Gibson, Braveheart). When a murderous gang of thieves arrives to rob a wealthy tenant, they must join forces to battle the criminals and escape with their lives before the entire city is deep underwater.

This movie looks like straight garbage. Even without the whitewashed casting and the vilification of Puerto Rican people and the cast’s inclusion of an alleged violent abuser and another with a loooong history of antisemitism and sexism looking to make a movie star comeback, the movie looks like any other generic middle-of-summer action thriller.

Except this movie does also have all of those other things, and on top of that, it uses a devastating catastrophe the left thousands of people dead as a mere backdrop for these white people’s shoot-out. (Technically, the movie doesn’t name the storm as being 2017’s Hurricane Maria but the comparison is obvious.)

They actually had the impudence to use “When it rains, it pours” as a cheeky catchphrase about a Category 5 hurricane just three years after Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, in a movie about a stubborn white man refusing to leave his home and then fending off a “murderous gang” of Puerto Ricans. This is the movie they thought people wanted to see right now? (Or ever?)

(image: Lionsgate)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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