Altralto

I was watching Mad Max the other night with my wife when, right at the beginning of the flick, there’s a playback of footage (probably representing his memory) of his wife being run over, when she said, “Hey, did you notice how his wife dies in this movie too?” The other movie I was thinking was Signs where she gets crushed between a car and a tree and gets her last words with her husband, Mel, who, ironically, is a priest. My wife wasn’t thinking about Signs, she was thinking about Lethal Weapon. This is when I knew I was onto something.

I quickly typed up the following movies off the top of my head (seriously folks, I didn’t check out imdb) where Mr. Gibson is a widower:

1. Mad Max
2.3.4.5. Lethal Weapon (all four of them, come on now, they count)
6. Braveheart
7. The Patriot
8. Signs

That’s eight flicks people. That’s right count ‘em. eight. The only other actor I figure comes in second is Lost’s Terry O’Quinn (yeah, John Locke) with his Stepfather movies (two of them in each of which it is assumed he killed several wives technically making him a widower many times over).

Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max is set in a dystopian near-future society suffering from a prolonged fuel shortage. Civil order is rapidly deteriorating and lawless gangs rampage across the desolate landscape, in defiance of the crumbling police force, the Main Force Patrol (MFP).

An escaped cop killer, the Nightrider, is killed during a high-speed pursuit by a young MFP patrolman, Max Rockatansky. The Nightrider’s comrades, a motorcycle gang led by the Toecutter, hold Max responsible and kill his partner, Jim Goose, when he attempts to bring them to justice for a violent spree in a small country town.

Distraught at Goose’s horrific death, Max walks away from the violence of the MFP and attempts to build a peaceful life with his wife Jessie and their infant son, Sprog.

Meanwhile, the Toecutter is still hungry for revenge for the Nightrider’s death.

Max, now resigned from the MFP, is spending time with his family in a secluded beachfront area when the Toecutter Gang stumble across their hideaway. Jessie and Sprog are brutally murdered.

Deranged with grief, Max equips himself with a black supercharged “Pursuit Special” Interceptor and sets out to track down the gang and avenge the deaths of his family.

Lethal Weapon (1987)
Roger Murtaugh has just turned 50, and only has a few more years to go before he retires from the Los Angeles Police Department. Martin Riggs has just lost his wife in an accident, and doesn’t care if he lives or dies. When they are paired together, Murtaugh has problems with Riggs suicidal attitude towards work, as they investigate a drugs baron dubbed “The General”.

Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
South African smugglers find themselves being hounded and harassed by Riggs and Murtaugh, two mismatched Los Angeles police officers. However, the South Africans are protected by diplomatic immunity and so the duo are assigned to witness protection duty in an attempt by their captain to keep his job. It is only when this witness reveals to them that he has already dealt with the smugglers that the trouble really starts

Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)
Police officers Riggs and Murtaugh team together for the third time. This time they must track down a guy who has robbed weapons from the Los Angeles police depot. Riggs and Murtaugh also have to deal with Leo Getz, the hectic guy from Lethal Weapon 2 and Riggs has very special problems with a young and beautiful female police officer.

Braveheart (1995)
Braveheart is the partly historical, partly mythological, story of William Wallace, a Scottish common man who fights for his country’s freedom from English rule around the end of the 13th century.

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)
With personal crises and age weighing in on them, LAPD officers Riggs and Murtaugh must contend with a deadly Chinese crimelord trying to get his brother out of prison.

The Patriot (2000)
The movie takes place in South Carolina in 1776. Benjamin Martin, a French-Indian war hero who is haunted by his past, is a patriot who wants no part in a war with Britian. Meanwhile, his two eldest sons, Gabriel and Thomas, can’t wait to go out and kill some Redcoats. When South Carolina decides to go to war with Britain, Gabriel immediatly signs up to fight…without his father’s permission. But soon, Colonel Tavington, British solder infamous for his brutal tactiks, captures Gabriel and sentences him to be hanged. As Gabriel is taken away, Thomas tries to free him, only to be killed by Tavington, in front of Benjamin. Now, seeking revenge for his son’s death, Benjamin leaves behind his 5 other children to bring independence to the 13 colonies.

Signs (2002)
Things go awry when Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), awake early one morning to find the dogs barking and the children–Bo, and her brother Morgan (Rory Culkin)–wandering bleary eyed in the corn fields. They discover a pattern of perfectly carved crop circles left the night before. Trying not to overreact, Graham ignores the media frenzy that has permeated all television and radio stations, and even shrugs off the oddly familiar information that Morgan reads in his book about extraterrestrials invading earth. The real challenge for Graham is to find the faith he needs to pull himself, and his family, through this unexplainable
series of events.

UPDATE:  HONORABLE MENTION:

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about his bitter custody dispute with Oksana Grigorieva.  He beats her apparently.   But will we ever know.  He was married for 28 years to Robyn, did she get beaten?  Anyways, we just wanted to add a preliminary honorable mention here just in case.  Here’s an excerpt from perezhilton.com:

Oksana Grigorieva’s lawyers intend to subpoena Mel’s ex-wife, Robyn Moore Gibson, in order to question her about her claims that Mel Gibson was not physically abusive during their recently-ended marriage of 28 years.  Wonder what’s up with the divorce and alimony.

Part of the reason for this new development is that Mel once admitted to Oksana that he threw a TV at his former wife. Oksana also reported that she once saw Mel hitting his youngest son, Tommy.

A TV? What the hell, Mel?!

Robyn has been involved with the case to some extent and told the judge that “Mel never engaged in any physical abuse of any kind toward me before, during, or after our marriage.”

Oksana thinks otherwise.

Oksana wants to establish that Mel is physically abusive, and claims that he punched her twice in the face and that she feared for both herself and her baby daughter. Her lawyers want to question Robyn specifically about the TV incident. Their goal is to strip Mel’s custody rights to their daughter Lucia.

There’s a lesson to be learned from this craziness, and that lesson is this: Never watch TV with Mel Gibson.

Terry O'Quinn as The Stepfather