Directed by Adrian Grunberg. Starring Mel Gibson, Peter Stormare, Dean Norris, Bob Gunton, Scott Cohen, Aaron Cohen, Patrick Bauchau 16 cert, general release, 95 mins

HERE’S A NOTION. Perhaps Mel Gibson should try and resuscitate his career by releasing a hugely violent exploitation film featuring a racial epithet in its title.

Marketed in the US as Get the Gringo, How I Spent My Summer Vacation finds Mel offering two splayed fingers to his detractors. With its investigation of a flawed middle-aged psyche, The Beaver seemed to suggest the Australian was open to humility and self- abasement. The new film confirms Mel’s determination to remain angry.

Directed by Adrian Grunberg, cinematographer on Gibson’s superb Apocalypto, How I Spent My Summer Vacation has all the blotchy verve of a straight-to-video shocker. Mel plays a hoodlum who, following a high-speed chase, is arrested by typecast untrustworthy Mexican police and detained in a prison the size of a small town.

Situated not far from Tijuana, El Pueblito really existed. Whole families inhabit a scruffy compound with its own shops, moral conventions and social hierarchies. (Thoughts of Gibson’s early adventures in Mad Max 2 burrow to the surface.) Our hero soon makes friends with a young boy and begins plotting his escape.

Vacation really grows on you. The opening half-hour – featuring wearying freeze-frames and an uncertain, quip-heavy voiceover – suggests yet another bowing of the knee to Quentin Tarantino. But, as events progress, the dialogue improves and the gritty texture asserts itself. As mid-budget, contemporary Mexican westerns go, it beats the breaches off anything Robert Rodriguez has delivered in the past 20 years.

It helps that Gibson now looks so pathologically nervy. You really can’t fake this degree of creased unease, and it proves very easy to believe that the hero is under constant existential pressure.

Admittedly, the plot is something of a mess. The film- makers are so embarrassed by their final twist – obvious to any viewer with eyes and functioning frontal lobes – that they chose to zoom past it at full, gas-guzzling pelt.

But Grunberg proves to be a fine director of action. He seems aware that if you’re going to steal, you should steal from the best. Sam Peckinpah need not swivel in his grave.