It’s been a long, twisted road for Mad Max: from stardom to controversy to a long layoff as an actor. But here’s Mel Gibson again, bringing his usual fury to “Edge of Darkness.”
While the commercials for this one promise a “Ransom”-shaped workout with a revenge-minded Mel, the movie itself is more than that. Boiled down from a 1985 British TV miniseries, “Edge” sprawls out from a mystifying murder into a large-scale political coverup.
Gibson plays Tom Craven, a Boston police detective who sees his grown daughter (Bojana Novakovic) shot while standing next to him. While the department begins its investigation, he tries to find out which of his enemies wanted him dead.
Things turn out to be more complicated than that. The trail leads to a quietly menacing energy contractor, whose CEO (Danny Huston) is weirdly slippery when Craven confronts him with questions. Everybody’s slippery, actually: a Massachusetts senator (Damian Young), a corporate fixer (Dennis O’Hare), Craven’s colleague (Jay O. Sanders).
The film begins in a conventional mode, but things perk up the first time Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) eases into the film. Hard to say who he is, exactly — he doesn’t seem to know himself — but he works for some bad people, unless he doesn’t want to work for them anymore.
Jedburgh has a series of philosophical conversations with Craven, which are probably warnings but maybe also a strange kind of kinship. He quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald and speaks Latin and sips expensive wine, and he keeps the movie from ever settling for simple action beats.
“Edge of Darkness” is directed by the same person that made the original TV series, Martin Campbell (who has since become a prized action filmmaker, including the excellent Bond reboot “Casino Royale”). He keeps this one on its rails, blending the shocks and conversation.
Some of the plot strands beg for more illumination (I think there’s a Blackwater-like organization in the mix somewhere, but I’m not sure), but that’s probably what you get when you reduce a six-hour original into a two-hour form. One of the screenwriters is William Monahan, the Oscar-winner of “The Departed.” Apparently he’s the go-to guy for convoluted Boston drama.
At the center of all this is that conflicted fellow, Mel Gibson, whose face is now creased and waxy — he looks older than his years, as though fighting his demons has taken a lot out of him.
Probably it has. But Gibson still has that unstable ferocity in his being — he can’t even walk across his humble kitchen without looking as though he’s going to punch a hole in the fridge. You have to have a tough dude in this movie to make it work, and Mel Gibson sure looks like a tough dude.
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