Dodgy return for Gibson

At The Movies

Edge of Darkness
DIRECTED BY: Martin Campbell
STARRING: Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
CERT: 15A

In recent times, Mel Gibson has been busy making a bit of a pillock of himself, in between accomplishing the remarkable feat of directing two films in four ancient foreign languages – Apocalypto in Mayan and The Passion Of The Christ in Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic. The latter, of course, brought him enough controversy all of its own – though I’m sure the film’s colossal success was a nice consolation.

In all of that, it’s easy to forget that Gibson’s last starring role was that of the retired minister visited by crop-loving aliens in M Night Shyamalan’s Signs, way back in 2002. Which is a whole other lifetime ago for some of us oldies.
Given the kind of creative direction he’s taken since then, you’d be forgiven for hoping that he’d mark his return to the big screen with something substantial and challenging. Instead, he’s back as an angry cop on a mission – a role he could do in his sleep, in a film that, at times, will have you struggling to stay awake. Gibson is Thomas Craven, a veteran Boston homicide detective, whose beloved daughter, Emma (Novakovic), delights him by coming home for an unexpected visit. But she’s not in the house long before someone calls to the door and guns her down in front of her father.
The natural assumption is that Craven himself was the target, but he soon suspects otherwise. And so off he goes on his one-man mission, determined to avenge his baby girl.
The trail leads him to her former employers, Northmoor, a giant corporation housed in very glamorous headquarters, where head honcho Jack Bennett (Huston) is such a perfectly smooth gentleman that he can only be up to his gills in all sorts of sinister carry on.
Which might also be the case with a mysterious British fellow called Jedburgh (Winstone), who turns up in Craven’s garden whispering very strange things indeed.
In any event, it’s not long before our man is caught up in our great old friend, the web of intrigue – and his one-man mission of revenge becomes just a tad bigger.
Edge Of Darkness is based on the excellent 1985 BBC series and brought to the big screen by its original director Martin Campbell, who makes an admirable enough fist of turning five great hours of television into a watchable Hollywood thriller. But the material deserved better.
Unfortuately, he could not avail of the services of his original writer, the late Troy Kennedy Martin and through no fault of his own, the political background of the series (Thatcher, Reagan and nuclear dread) has largely vanished.
Which is not to say he and screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell could not have fashioned something powerful from the current landscape – but they’ve settled instead for a bog standard star vehicle populated with cutout characters speaking bog standard dialogue in a manner clearly learned from watching bog standard thrillers. A film, in other words, which, like 99% of its multiplex contemporaries, doesn’t trust its audience to think.
And just in case you might want to anyway when things get complicated, director Campbell takes the time between action scenes to spell it all out for you, slowing things down at times to a hearse’s pace – the same mistake he made in the sporadically great but mostly awful Casino Royale.
For his part, Gibson is in good form and still cuts it as a leading man, though he doesn’t have to do anything new. Like Robert Downey’s Sherlock Holmes, his Craven is now chiefly a man of action and God help anyone in his way.
In support, Ray Winstone bounces well off Gibson and their scenes are the best thing about the film. Huston, too, is impressive as the corporate snake, but like everyone else around him, he really never gets to do anything original.
Oh well.