Unreal Movie Review: Edge of Darkness

Seeing Mel Gibson back onscreen is what I imagine it would be like greeting a loved one getting out of jail after a time away. Sure, they’d made some mistakes recently, but once you see their face again, it reminds you of all the good times you used to have, and all the potential there is for a future that can be like the past.

I really do believe Gibson is a great actor, despite his personal shortcomings that have made tabloid headlines over the past few years, and to see him back on film after a seven year hiatus is a sight for sore eyes. However, the film he’s making his return to form in isn’t quite worthy of him, and instead feels like a knockoff of many a revenge/conspiracy thriller that came before it.

Gibson is Thomas Craven, a homicide detective welcoming home his daughter for a long-awaited visit. But mere hours into their reunion, a black car pulls up to his porch, and his daughter is laid out by a shotgun blast that cuts her in half.

Craven then sets out on a mission that’s part revenge, part sleuthing, as he wants to hunt those down responsible, but as he does so, he uncovers a big, bad secret that his daughter’s employer, a big, bad private defense contract firm, has been keeping, and things continue to escalate with bodies pilling up everywhere.

The problem with Edge of Darkness is the way it’s sold. We’re led to believe this is a father on the rampage story in the vein of the greatly heralded Taken, and the less-so Death Sentence. But that’s not really true, rather, there’s a lot more talking than punching, and a great deal more mean stares than bullets being thrown around. This wouldn’t be a negative, had the plot been formed into anything that was remotely possible to follow, but instead the “conspiracy” we uncover is perpetrated by a company that is nothing short of idiotic.

“For a CEO of a giant company, you’re pretty damn easy to talk to whenever I feel like it.”

It’s a multi-billion dollar defense corporation that’s up to some pretty shady shit as you may have guessed, yet somehow, their entire offensive and defensive task force is made up of two men, who despite their ability to round-up and kill everyone Mel Gibson talks to, never manages to hit him specifically, and in one scene where they DO catch up to him, instead of shooting him, they taze him and drag them back to their secret hilltop headquarters like Dr. Evil is preparing to drop him in a tank full of laser sharks. Naturally, like James Bond would, Mel escapes, but literally all he has to do his headbutt two unarmed scientists on the way out. Bond would have had to fight a whole army, so what the hell kind of defense firm is this anyway?

The Bond comparisons don’t end there however. What would seem to be a murder mystery along the reality lines of Mystic River escalates into a matter of national security and pending GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR. All of this, naturally, is expected to be thwarted by one mentally unstable cop with a six shooter.

The film blurs genre lines that weren’t necessarily meant to ever be blurred. To go from a tragic drive-by of a local cop’s daughter to the possible end of the world as we know it is like shifting from first directly to fifth on the freeway, dropping out your transmission in the process.

And that’s what it feels like really, like there’s a giant hole missing in this film which drives us to make us care about what’s going on. The “evil corporation” is a tired villain already, but thrown in a heaping helping of ineptness and political and governmental shadow figures who add nothing to the storyline? It’s just not worth following, and is exhausting to try and untangle.

Five hours later, and I still have zero idea who Ray Winstone’s character in this movie was.

The film’s bright spot has to be Gibson himself, as when you get past his rather off-putting accent, has all the emotional forcefulness and badassery that we remember from his old roles. Though he’s no Liam Neeson fighting slave traders, during the second half of the film when the pace speeds up from a crawl to a light jog, he does put on a pretty good show. I only wish the film was consistently good enough to warrant his involvement.

Edge of Darkness has some good ideas and a pretty solid lead, but the propensity of large corporations for idiocy and evil is something I’m rather tired of watching unless their devious plans are something that I HAVEN’T seen in more than one season of 24. Darkness aimed to toe the line between revenge flick and conspiracy thriller, and in the process failed to pitch a solid tent in either camp. I hope this doesn’t scare you off from movies for another seven years Mel.

2 out of 5 stars

“No matter how much they pay you, do no reboot Lethal Weapon.”