EDGE OF DARKNESS
ICON
RELEASED 29 January 2010
When Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson) sees his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) blasted with a shotgun as she stands next to him on his own front porch, it’s assumed the veteran Boston homicide detective has survived an attack meant for him. As Craven investigates Emma’s friends and colleagues, it becomes clear that her research at the Northmoor nuclear plant holds more secrets than anyone wants to admit to, from private security firms to members of the government. Craven soon discovers the major players will stop at nothing to conceal the truth.
It might be eight years since Mel Gibson last graced our screens (2002’s ‘Signs’) but he’s lost none of his movie star appeal. Mel still does ‘angry’ better than anyone else, and he still looks like he could break your arm if you upset him enough. Sadly, Mel doesn’t get to do much ‘ass-kicking’ until the last quarter of the film, wandering around asking lots of questions of mysterious people as the plot slowly unfolds. The whole movie has something of a confused identity really, with a story of political intrigue and ethical concern fighting to dominate what desperately wants to be a full-blooded Mel Gibson revenge thriller.
Ray Winstone plays the other main character in the film, a shadowy ‘clean-up’ man called Jedburgh (or ‘Captain’ Jedburgh as WInstone bemusingly declares towards the end of the film). Winstone employs his own accent, which leads to all of his lines (the film is set in Boston remember) having a faintly comical sound. It’s a bit like ‘who let the funny Brit on set’! To make his character more ludicrous, he smokes cigars and drinks red wine from a picnic hamper while sitting on the riverside, like some kind of highbrow writer on his lunchbreak. Perhaps Jedburgh has literary aspirations as he does like to quote famous authors, another character trait that feels misjudged.
Coming from ‘Casino Royale’ director Martin Campbell, ‘Edge of Darkness’ feels somewhat jumbled (based on Campbell’s own six-hour TV series, perhaps this isn’t a surprise) and ‘cheap’ (tell me the opening shot doesn’t look badly artificial, as well as the lack of big, nail-biting set-pieces for a Mel Gibson film). The film only really comes alive when Mel gets angry and spouts lines like ‘you’re either hanging on the cross, or you’re banging in the nails’. Gibson’s character Tommy Craven feels rounded enough, and the regular moments when he remembers his daughter as a child are nicely-handled, although the film fails to detail more clearly who Emma Craven was as an adult and a whistle-blower, both for the audience and Thomas Craven’s own need to understand his daughter better.
‘Edge of Darkness’ isn’t a classic, but at the very least, it’s good to see Gibson back on top form.
THREE OUT OF FIVE