Film review: Edge of Darkness

Published on Thursday 28 January 2010 18:03

EDGE OF DARKNESS *** DIRECTED BY: MARTIN CAMPBELL STARRING: MEL GIBSON, RAY WINSTONE, DANNY HUSTON, BOJANA NOVAKOVIC

MEL Gibson's penchant for films featuring violent eye-for-an-eye justice (see Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Ransom, Payback) gets another workout in Edge of Darkness, a solid conspiracy-thriller-cum-vigilante-movie based on the 1980s BBC mini-series of the same name. Directed by Casino Royale's Martin Campbell, who made the original Yorkshire-set drama in 1985, the film version transposes the action to Boston where Gibson's veteran homicide detective Thomas Craven finds himself drawn into a convoluted web of a corporate malfeasance and sinister politicking after his daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), is killed.

His colleagues in the Boston PD think the bullets were meant for him but Craven suspects otherwise: shortly before she was killed, Emma, a research intern at a nuclear energy facility, appeared to be suffering from radiation poisoning and seemed on the brink of telling her father about what she really did at work. Neglecting to share these details with his colleagues, Craven lets bloodlust muffle his grief and sets out to find Emma's killer, uncovering the threads of dirty conspiracy involving eco-warriors, corrupt politicians, evil executives and sinister government spooks.

Heavy on talk, yet zapped into life with bluntly effective moments of extreme violence, the film's structure suits Gibson, who distinguishes himself by acting his age with a lack of vanity rare in Hollywood. He's paunchier and thinner on top than he used to be, so Gibson's natural physique matches that of an approaching-retirement-age cop, something he doesn't try to cover up with dodgy hairpieces or impossible feats of derring-do. Fight scenes have a rough, messy quality and Campbell is careful to show how much they leave Gibson's character physically exhausted, gasping for breath.

Which isn't to say Gibson can no longer cut it as a lethal weapon; he's just not as physically efficient or as invincible as he used to be and the film is all the better for acknowledging that fact.

Edge of Darkness affords Gibson the chance to remind us why he became one of the biggest stars of the 1980s and 1990s. Absent from cinema screens for much of the past decade while he concentrated on directing films and generating reputation-damaging headlines, he's always at his best when called upon to play broken, grief-stricken, righteous men, ones fuelled by a kind of primordial anger that erupts in unpredictable ways when their blood is up and their cause is just. It's a persona Gibson honed to perfection in Mad Max and the first Lethal Weapon, and he imbues Craven – his first above-the-title blockbuster role since Signs in 2002 – with similar fire.

Surrounding him is a juicy supporting cast that includes Danny Huston, as the deceitful chairman of the nuclear energy company Craven's daughter worked for, and Ray Winstone, as a shadowy British spook named Jedburgh. The latter has been hired to help clean up the mess surrounding Emma's high-profile death, but the film keeps his motivations deliberately murky. When he's not popping up unannounced in Craven's backyard to fill him in on details related to Emma's murder, he's going through something of a crisis of conscience related to the way corporate interests and government agendas structure the world in devious, damaging ways. It's the kind of role that could have made for a one-note character, the sort that pops up in this sort of film to provide lots of plot-clarifying exposition, but instead Campbell uses him to playfully obscure that plot by having him provide the illusion of multiple conspiracies so convoluted that no-one will be able to unravel them.

Elsewhere Campbell finds a nifty way to update the nuclear paranoia of the 1980s original for the current political climate (it certainly resonates – albeit in a pulpy way – with the ongoing inquiries into the origins of the Iraq war). His decision to retain the ghostly presence of Emma, however, proves an act of fidelity too far. On film it's too clunky and it does a disservice to Gibson, who is a good enough actor to convey the emptiness and acute sense of loss Craven feels without the need for distracting visual aids. It's a device that doesn't really suit Campbell's visual style either, which is blunt and functional, not lyrical and expressive.

For the most part his choices are in synch with the propulsive detective film this is aiming to be. It's no candidate for greatness, but it does a good job of condensing a six-hour story into a lean thriller without feeling as if too much has been sacrificed. Meanwhile, Gibson, perpetually clothed in worn-out raincoat, makes for a compellingly damaged and compulsively watchable gumshoe with his own definition of justice.