At first sight, writer/director Mel Gibson's Mayan epic seems intimidating. It's 140 minutes long, has subtitled Yucatec Maya dialogue and is set in pre-Spanish Mexico. Yet despite appearances it's no pretentious art house film but a thrilling chase movie in which Mayan warrior Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is pursued through the jungle by a vicious rival tribe eager to use him as a blood sacrifice. Stocking up on sadistic violence, Gibson matches The Passion of the Christ's bloodsoaked tableaux with a catalogue of astonishingly gory beheadings and impalements, all set against the forbidding backdrop of Mayan pyramids and lush tropical undergrowth. He directs the set pieces with style, creating an exciting, exhausting action adventure that's like a strangely compelling hybrid of Mayan mythology, Cannibal Holocaust-style video nasty and Tarzan.

Set in the Mayan civilization, when a man's idyllic presence is brutally disrupted by a violent invading force, he is taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression where a harrowing end awaits him. Through a twist of fate and spurred by the power of his love for his woman and his family he will make a desperate break to return home and to ultimately save his way of life.