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In What Women Want, Gibson plays an ad-agency executive whose brain gets rewired during a freak bathroom accident. Suddenly he can hear what women are thinking; hilarity and personal growth ensue. Before the film's third act--before he falls for his new boss (Hunt) and learns to relate to his teenage daughter (Ashley Johnson)--Gibson sends himself up. The character is a charming but politically incorrect brute, a role that Gibson has played onscreen and off throughout his career. A few years back, he got trounced by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation after a particularly nasty comment to a reporter about homosexual sex. He has been public and unapologetic about his strict Roman Catholic views on divorce and abortion. Despite a handful of soft and serious performances, Gibson is for all practical purposes an action hero, to be forever associated with Mad Max and the swaggering, gun-slinging cop Martin Riggs of his four Lethal Weapon movies.
"There is that perception," admits Gibson. "The Payback guy who goes around shooting people indiscriminately." Truth be told, Gibson enjoys the perception, and there seems to be an implicit agreement between him and his audience. All parties concerned know he's not as bad as he says he is. He does admit that he was drunk when he made the offending antigay remark, though he has since kicked alcohol and, in the course of recovery, "cooled down a bit," he says. "I was the kind of guy who could strangle an inanimate object. I was a road-rage kind of guy." Asked if his views on abortion and divorce have softened, he says, "No, they haven't changed much. People call me Attila the Hun and all this stuff, but it's how I attempt to live my life. There are basically 10 rules, and they work if you adhere to them. Love thy neighbor--that's a good societal plan."
The words great guy are often used to describe Gibson, except by Hunt, who says, "He's the greatest guy. He's a guy who on one hand has this freeze-dried rat in his trailer that he tortures people with--and then can talk about Shakespeare's language, about iambic pentameter. He's both those people." The question facing the $25 million man is this: Who exactly will he be in the coming decades? His image--the winking, wisecracking, pistol-packing hero-clown--is already showing signs of age. The '80s-style action movie he mastered is past its prime, and Gibson looks all of his 44 years, if not a bit more. Not long ago, during a late night of channel surfing, he says, "I snuck up on [1983's] The Year of Living Dangerously. I watched a couple of minutes and thought, 'Hell, did I get old!'"
If What Women Want has its expected success, Gibson will have proved himself a worthy romantic-comedy successor to Cary Grant. Or he could evolve into a Sean Connery, who has in a masterly way affixed himself in the public consciousness as both the beautiful young Bond and the Oscar-winning old lion of The Untouchables. But, more than likely, Gibson will follow the path of another aging sex symbol, Robert Redford, who has extended his career by working behind the camera.