Mel Gibson Mugs His Way Through the 2022 Radio-Themed Thriller On the Line as a Shock Jock Menaced by an Unseen Caller in, an Imaginary-Seeming Movie Worth Ignoring
Redbox might have gone the way of the dinosaur, but its spirit lives on in what I and others have dubbed “imaginary movies.”
Last year I wrote an almost suspiciously popular blog post about John Cusack’s strange descent into the mercenary world of imaginary movies.
This was a big hit at the time of its release and remains a page-view winner because it’s likely one of the first things that comes up when you Google, “What the hell happened to John Cusack, and why is he always wearing the same dumb black baseball hat?”
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Cusack is making money the cheap and sleazy way with mercenary appearances in interchangeable direct-to-video schlock.
Cusack isn’t the only faded star reduced to churning out imaginary movies of great quantity and negligible quality. Nicolas Cage spent a sorry decade making imaginary movies for undiscriminating audiences before an extraordinary comeback.
Once upon a time, Mel Gibson was one of the biggest and best-paid movie stars in the world before a drunk driving arrest that somehow morphed into an anti-semitic rant and leaked audio of Gibson terrorizing the mother of one of his children in a racist, vengeful range rendered Gibson more or less unemployable in studio films.
If Gibson couldn’t make real films with real studios, real costars, and real budgets, he could at least keep busy by churning out imaginary movies.
Imaginary movies feel made-up. Despite featuring at least one major former movie star, these films have no cultural impact. Critics don’t review them. There is no cultural conversation about their merits. They leave behind no footprint.
These movies exist, but just barely. Bruce Willis famously spent the last decade of his career making imaginary movies for what turned out to be a very good reason: his mind and his memory were fading, and imaginary movies allowed him to continue to work and make money with low-stakes, low-budget direct-to-video fodder that did not waste too much of the beloved actor’s limited time and energy.
That is obviously not true of Mel Gibson. Gibson is apparently worth hundreds of millions of dollars and appears to be in robust health. He made a whole lot of money during his lengthy reign as one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He made even more money from The Passion of the Christ, which he self-funded and became the highest-grossing independent film of all time.
Gibson never has to work another day in his life. He’s got generational wealth. His great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to live off his fortune.
Yet Gibson cranks out imaginary movies all the same. In 2022 alone, the noted anti-Semite appeared in no less than SEVEN movies.
SEVEN movies! In just one year. Of those seven movies, only one qualifies as an actual motion picture. The only non-imaginary movie Gibson made that year was the Mark Wahlberg passion project, Father Stu.
Wahlberg remains one of Gibson’s champions. Wahlberg and Gibson shared the screen in Daddy’s Home 2 in addition to Father Stu, and in 2025, Wahlberg will star in the Gibson-directed studio thriller Flight Risk.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gibson’s best buddy is someone who committed a hate crime against an Asian man as a teenager. People needing forgiveness are more inclined to forgive others for their transgressions.
When he was still a big star, Gibson was one of several huge stars connected to Larry Cohen’s red-hot screenplay for Phone Booth.
Colin Farrell ended up starring in the film for Joel Schumacher, but a little over two decades later, Gibson starred in a direct-to-video stinker that’s essentially Phone Booth For Idiots, but also, strangely, Talk Radio For Idiots, Speed For Idiots, and, ultimately, The Game, But You Know, For Dum-Dums.
Gibson inexplicably chose to devote a sizable chunk of his life to playing Elvis Cooney, a shock jock known, loved, and hated for his brash, in-your-face attitude and take no prisoners approach to radio.
He is deep into his sixties and has been on the air for longer than many of his listeners have been alive, so he’s also something of a dinosaur.
The older codger calls the pop icon married to Jay-Z “Bouncy Knowles” and bitches about being a “radio host, not a TikTok jock.”
His boss is not impressed. “The audience is not interested in your social media,” she informs him.
Elvis is even less interested in his social media than his audience. I wish the movie had gone deeper into this subject and had complain to her grouchy employee, “Your TikToks are subpar, your thirst traps leave everyone bone-dry, your Throwback Thursdays are half-assed, your Instagram is lame, and your Truth Social posts are somehow too fascist even for that awful social media site. Your Twitter game is a mess! How can you even live with yourself?”
Like a shock jock, Mel Gibson is certainly known for his rants and saying explosive things while angry, but I would imagine that the actor, filmmaker, and bigot would like you to forget about that.
Perhaps that’s why Gibson gives a curiously low-energy, sleepy performance as a ballsy entertainer who will say anything to get a response and keep the audience engaged. It’s possible that Gibson didn’t want to risk plummeting once again into an endless abyss of darkness by really throwing himself into the role of a proudly belligerent asshole.
The cranky radio professional is grinding his way through another night of advice and attitude when he gets an unusual and wanted caller. He’s a creep who professes to be at the shock jock’s home, holding his wife and daughter hostage.
The creepy caller claims to be the boyfriend of a former intern who slept with Elvis and then was the subject of mocking banter and on-air ridicule for months afterward. She was so humiliated and traumatized that she ostensibly committed suicide, leaving her rage-filled boyfriend hungry for revenge.
Big stars in imaginary movies often have the kind of minor supporting roles that can be knocked off in a few days with no extra takes. Willis, for example, would get a million dollars for a day or two’s work. It was the most transactional of relationships: Willis was paid a large amount of money for very little work, and a low-rent, low-budget, direct-to-streaming sub-mediocrity got to put his name and face on their poster.
That’s not Mel Gibson and On the Line. This is damn near a one-man show. The Lethal Weapon star is in pretty much every scene. Gibson’s not in it for the money. There obviously wasn’t much to go around, and he is obscenely rich. He didn’t do it because he thought it could benefit his career. At best, this can do nothing to help his career or hurt it.
The only reason Gibson made the film was because he believed in it and felt this was a story worth telling with him in the lead role.
At this point, On the Line turns into caffeine pills at a truck stop: a poor man’s Speed. The lunatic on the other end of the line orders Elvis and an intern who began work on the worst possible day to run around like maniacs doing his bidding and playing his warped game.
Roger Jackson, best known as the voice of Ghostface in the original Scream, was cast as the unseen man who terrorizes Colin Ferrell in Phone Booth. According to Larry Cohen, it just didn’t work with Jackson, so he was fired and replaced by Kiefer Sutherland. The result was no masterpiece, but Sutherland certainly put in a menacing and convincing performance. That speaks to how important that role is.
On the Line thoroughly botches the casting of the creep menacing Elvis from an unknown vantage point. His hysterical, cartoonish performance starts at eleven and just goes up from there.
The actor uses a crazy voice that’s unintentionally funny when it’s supposed to be scary.
A better movie would make this put-upon schmuck at least a tiny bit sympathetic. In On the Line, he’s never anything but a squeaky-voiced villain, a hammy dunce.
He’s a seemingly fatal doofus, however. As the shock jock and the intern race about in a manic panic, the bodies begin to pile up, including Elvis’ professional rival Justin (Kevin Dillon).
On the Line is so low-rent and sketchy that when Kevin Dillon shows up, it feels like he is doing Mel Gibson a favor instead of the other way around. Without him, this would be Gibson and a no-name cast.
Stop reading if you don’t want the ending spoiled.
It turns out that the reason everything feels like a wildly implausible fiction is because it WAS all a joke. The whole night was a giant prank on the new guy. It’s one of those pranks you find in films, and only in films, where dozens of people will work together for months planning and executing an impossibly elaborate scheme costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, all for the dumb look on the target’s face when he realizes he’s been deceived.
The intern looks less surprised and amused than traumatized and devastated. He tumbles backward down a flight of stairs, seemingly to his death.
Oh no! The prank went too far! Someone died! How tragic! And sad!
But actually, that was a prank as well. The intern was actually an actor pretending to be an intern to prank the prankster.
The prankster became the prankee!
It’s all just as insultingly stupid as it sounds.
In a particularly painful exchange, the actor pretending to be the menacing caller tells Elvis over the phone, “This could make for a great movie.”
Elvis grouchily responds, “I think you need a rewrite. Sounds like a real stinker.”
On the Line needs more than just a rewrite. Its script should have been hurled angrily into the circular file because it is a real stinker.
Nathan got life-changing dental implants, but they’re crazy expensive, so he set up a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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