Edge of Darkness (2010)

I’ve got to hand it to Edge of Darkness. This movie doesn’t waste any time getting down to business–the business of a pissed-off Mel Gibson kicking ass and taking names. It’s an enterprise that Gibson had abandoned since he defended his baby brother and kids from aliens in Signs eight years ago…unless you count the freelance work he did with an L.A. traffic cop known as only as “sugar tits.”

This time, Mad Mel plays Tom Craven, a squeaky-clean Bah-ston cop whose deepest connection is with his only daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic). At the start of the film, the MIT grad arrives via train to visit her dad. She’s only there for a few hours, inexplicably throwing up the whole time, until Craven decides he should take her to the doctor. No sooner does he open the front door than a drive-by shooter blows a cavernous hole in her chest with a shotgun.

All of Craven’s police colleagues and the media assume that the shots were actually meant for him and attempt to figure out who might have held a grudge. But Craven instinctively knows that something else is afoot and starts investigating the people in Emma’s life, of whom he had known so little while she was still breathing.

By investigating, I mean kicking the crap out of. Even before he starts getting flashbacks of Emma as a little girl, it’s clear that daddy’s hurt, shock, and rage are deep and down. So when he discovers Burnham, the boyfriend who knows more about her death than he’s saying (Shawn Roberts), Craven takes the opportunity to rearrange his face. He just barely manages to hold back the urge to do the same after meeting with Jack Bennett (Danny Huston), Emma’s suave, over-groomed boss-man at private defense contractor, Northmoor.

Craven eventually connects the dots–through bagmen, lawyers and a lefty activist group called Nightflower–all the way to a corrupt Massachusetts senator. He is allowed to do so by Jedburgh (Ray Winstone), the cockney fixer hired to clean up the mess. Jedburgh, it seems, is feeling his own mortality and identifies with the father’s fury enough to blur the lines of his allegiances. In return, Craven promises not to arrest anyone connected with his daughter’s death. He’s got his police-issue revolver for those folks.

Adapted from a 1985 British mini-series by screenwriters William Monahan and David Bovell, Edge of Darkness is an interesting animal. On the one hand, the story of government corruption and corporate greed uncovered through the investigation of Emma’s murder is one so familiar in the post-Enron, post-Blackwater era that it hardly registers emotionally. Still, the conversations (or should I say interrogations) Craven has along his vengeful path are scripted so subtly–always around the topic at hand, rather than about it–that it effectively increases the intrigue.

Likewise, helmsman Martin Campbell, who also directed the mini-series, paces the action curiously. This film is not the relentless ass-kicker that 2009’s Taken was. But then again, humble Tom Craven, heretofore a mild-mannered good guy, isn’t a trained ex-spy. He doesn’t have a clock to contend with. He’s got all the time in the world to mete out justice. And part of me wishes that the 108-minute movie had taken a little more time to do it, if only to see more of mysterious Jedburgh.

Most of all, Mel Gibson isn’t Liam Neeson. His real-life troubled backstory, which reads on every forehead crease and jowl on his face, imbues Craven with a hidden hurt that precludes the kind of giddy retribution that some audiences may be in search of. Gibson still rages with the best of them, but this time it’s with a quiet sort of seething that both helps and hinders the tale.

Ultimately, Edge of Darkness is a flawed but functional story. If nothing else, it’s nice to see Mel’s return to the screen if not fully to his original form.

Also Recommended:

• Righteous Kill
• Quantum of Solace
• Brothers