It’s been seven years since The Singing Detective, and Mel Gibson is finally back with his starring role in Edge of Darkness. The film is helmed by Martin Campbell, who directed the BBC mini-series of the same name back in 1985. On the surface, the film is a plain ol’ thriller, but it delves deeper by mixing heavy action with twisted suspense. It’s a government conspiracy that’s full of twists, turns, and a whole lot of corruption.
At the age of 54, Gibson has a few more wrinkles and a lot less hair framing his now-faded baby blues. After a few hard years, the wildness that once exploded from him has dimmed, but he hasn’t totally lost his spark. After battling injustice in Lethal Weapon, Braveheart, and The Patriot, he’s once again the martyr in Edge of Darkness as Thomas Craven, a Boston police detective and single father to Emma (Bojana Novakovic).
The film starts off sharply when Emma is unexpectedly murdered as she and her father are exiting his home—leading the police to believe that he was the intended target. Craven sets out to find the killer on his own, soon finding himself tangled in a complex web of corporate and political scandals in which his daughter was secretly involved. Hell-bent in a beige raincoat, Craven proceeds to kick some serious butt.
The film has some really great action-packed moments—Craven’s experience in the police force allows him to show off his crafty gunmanship, though his desperate state as an unstable father is what really triggers his willingness to stop at nothing. Each scene pertaining to Craven’s hunt for vengeance is full of blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention the relatability of his raw emotion—basically, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Gibson.
The rest of the film fell a bit short, though, from the buzz that had surrounded it. Though I was often on the edge of my seat, and at some points jumping right out of it, the plot slowly became repetitive and ultimately predictable. The only unforseen scenes were the ones that lead to confusion on my part, often due to poor delivery from the actors. (Not to play the blame game, but hello, could their Boston accents be any worse? In the words of Chandler Bing, enunciate!)
The transitions lacked flow, things didn’t always fit together, and many ends were left loose—clearly, the script could have been better written. Gibson is given some pretty lame aphorisms before he kills off each victim and his character’s sense of humour doesn’t quite mesh with the plot. What begin as moments of light-hearted comic relief grow to be instances of inappropriateness. Most of these I was able to forgive and forget, but there was one that was just drilled in too deep, which begs me to ask: what’s with everything being illegal in Massachusettes?
Despite the choppy plot and the almost inevitable extra-cheesy ending, I did enjoy the return of Mel. It was a decent movie—maybe not good enough to pay $13 to watch in theatres, but a good random rental for somewhere down the line.
Edge of Darkness is now in theatres.
