Mel Gibson’s new film “Apocalypto,” a brutal tale set the lush rainforest of the Yucatan, is a riveting, taut piece of action cinema that delivers genuine heart-stopping suspense while immersing its audience in a lost world of jungle and stone.

Gibson, obviously a fan of the bloody period film, transports his audience to a waning Mayan empire shortly before the Spanish conquest of the new world.

The film centers on a rainforest villager named Jaguar Paw, and a key scene finds him lowering his pregnant wife and young son into a sinkhole to keep them safe from deadly marauders ravaging his home. Jaguar Paw is then forcibly taken by fearsome warriors to a Mayan city in need of human sacrifice.

“Apocalypto” could be criticized for its predictability, including the obvious deus ex machina of “Apocalypto’s” third act. But regardless of the film’s conventional structure, it’s the skill with which Gibson and crew tell the story that counts here.

“Apocalypto” is that rare action film experience with masterful suspense that flows relentlessly throughout the course of the picture, like Jan de Bont’s “Speed” or Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” It’s a great chase picture set in a historical period seldom realized on the big screen.

I love when a movie can completely immerse you in a place you’ve never been before, and that’s definitely what happens in “Apocalypto” with a lavish production that recreates a beautiful Mayan civilization and surrounding jungle cultures. You’re completely transported into another world in this film without it feeling phony by its computer-generated effects and modern cinematic wizardry.

When our captives experience the Mayan pyramid temples for the first time, we share in their astonishment and fear as the richly produced sequence (both real and digital) then turns into a horrifying cinematic realization of Mesoamerican human sacrifice filled with absolute tension and sadism, echoing the William Wallace death sequence in “Braveheart.”

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Rudy Youngblood, a Native-American actor who plays Jaguar Paw in the film, is a very expressive actor in the eyes — an important feature that works well for a mainstream film completely spoken in Mayan, just as Gibson’s “Passion” utilized Latin and Aramaic for unmatched period accuracy.

When the village is raided, and Jaguar Paw and his friends are taken, it’s genuinely thrilling and terrifying because Gibson, Youngblood and the cast establish and invest in the villagers so much real humanity and heart. A joyful scene in which Jaguar Paw beats his chest in triumph during a mid-movie waterfall sequence conveys the tremendous heroic spirit and fun of this movie.

Despite the joy of the Jaguar’s triumphs in the film, we also have his tragedies, and Gibson plays up tragedy and violence like no other. Unlike most Hollywood action movies that rely so much on catch-phrase humor and computer-generated fakery, “Apocalypto’s” many visually harrowing bloodbaths contain so much visceral authenticity, it’s a challenge to comfort oneself while watching the film with the adage, “It’s only a movie.”

Gibson has a talent for painting his frame with good helpings of testosterone, bloodshed and heartwrenching drama. He’s like Hemingway meets Michael Bay. In addition to being one of the foremost “man flick” movie directors working today, Gibson’s has a deft talent for balancing intensely kinetic heart-pumping visuals with the poetic reflectiveness you get from slowing down a well-crafted shot.

The action in this film is among the most gory and violent I’ve seen, but if you can stomach the violence found in “Braveheart” and “Passion of the Christ,” you can probably handle those shiny red still-beating hearts cut from the living chests of the poor souls in “Apocalypto.”

Some may call the violence in “Apocalypto” a bit gratuitous, but it is important for rational human beings to be conscious of violence as social reality and its ugliness. The use of violence in this picture is artfully done.

Gibson’s work always reminds me of the manic kinetic reverie found in the films of Japan’s great director Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese. In addition to understanding good drama, Gibson knows the right visual rhythms with his shots, angles and sequence speeds, just as a musical composer understands the harmonics of different sounds and rhythms for dramatic effect.

Despite my disgust and sadness over Gibson’s rhetoric and behavior during his drunken-driving arrest in Malibu earlier in the year, I remain a fan and advocate of the flawed man’s artistry, which I came to admire in 1995 with the release of his award-winning “Braveheart.”

He’s right up there with Kurosawa when it comes to meaningful, heartfelt and unforgettable visual bravado.

In other words, “Apocalypto” is one hell of a movie you shouldn’t miss in the theater.

Neil Nisperos can be reached at 737-1059 or nnisperos@lompocrec ord.com.