Get the Gringo

An American criminal caught at the Mexican border with two million dollars is thrown into a prison called El Pueblito. It is not an ordinary prison: families live inside, business runs, and it has its own hierarchy. He works on getting his money back while protecting a boy who has been marked for his organs. Adrian Grunberg directed. Mel Gibson starred, co-wrote and produced, and his own company Icon Productions financed the 20 million dollar budget. Filming took place in San Diego, Brownsville in Texas and Veracruz in Mexico, with the prison scenes shot in a real facility, Ignacio Allende. It never went to cinemas. It was released exclusively through video-on-demand. Gibson defended the decision: we are just in a different era, many people like to see things in their homes, and he believed that was the future. The reviews were good. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 82 percent; The Guardian described Gibson playing a funny, psychopathic, sharp-thinking outsider and compared the style to seventies exploitation cinema. The gross stopped at 8.8 million dollars. Who it is for: viewers who like hard, sardonic crime films and Gibson in villain mode. Who it is not for: anyone sensitive to how Mexico is depicted. The country is used from start to finish as a backdrop of chaos.