Film Review: 'Edge of Darkness'

The Current Cinema

Life and Death Matters
by Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts
February 8, 2010

Running at more than five hours, over six episodes, “Edge of Darkness” was a tense eco-drama—not something you see every day—which appeared on British television in 1985. It was directed by Martin Campbell, who, a quarter of a century later, is revisiting the fray. In the interim, he has made one lusty Zorro movie, one limp Zorro movie, two of the most propulsive James Bond films, “GoldenEye” and “Casino Royale,” and, lest we forget, “Vertical Limit,” which sounds like a biopic of Tom Cruise but is, in fact, an enjoyably stupid thriller about mountaineers. Now Campbell has redirected “Edge of Darkness,” trimming it to less than two hours, moving the action from Yorkshire to Boston, and taking on board, as his screenwriters, Andrew Bovell and William Monahan—something of a Boston specialist, what with his Academy Award for “The Departed.”

Mel Gibson, who looks and sounds not a day over sixty-five, plays a policeman named Thomas Craven. The name is a joke, since the movie insists, time and again, that he has all but dispensed with fear. Warned by a fellow-officer that “someone armed and dangerous” is on the loose, Craven replies, “What do you think I am?” This is delivered not with a wink and a wild grin—we are not, thank Heaven, in “Lethal Weapon” territory—but with a pared-down, dead-eyed plainness, which goes with Craven’s salty hair, thinning at the back, and the frown lines carved across his forehead like rifts in a relief map. He wears a loose-fitting suit that he might have picked up at a morgue. “I’m the guy with nothing to lose who doesn’t give a shit,” he says. You’re telling me.

As a rule, Gibson’s characters look stranded unless they have sins to atone for, or frustrations to vent. Craven smiles when his daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic)—a scientific researcher home on a visit—arrives at the train station, but the smile is awkward and shifty, as if he were anticipating trouble. And here it is: a masked gunman at his front door, presumably aiming at Craven but hitting Emma by mistake. She dies in his arms, the only child of a single man, and from this point Craven is set on his vengeful path—weirdly calm, in the confident knowledge that blood will have to be spilled. The most rousing sequence comes much later, as a hit-and-run driver, having already picked off an innocent woman, turns the car around and comes back to flatten Craven, too. And does he flee, or dodge, or hurl himself aside? No, he takes his gun and marches firmly toward the oncoming vehicle, as if the road beneath his feet were the dust of the O.K. Corral, firing at the windshield as he goes. It’s been thirty years since “Mad Max,” but, when it comes to man vs. machine, Gibson is still up for a fight.

The original plot has not been altered much, though perhaps it should have been. In both cases, Craven soon discovers that Emma was the intended victim, and that she had been an activist, bent on exposing the crimes of the nuclear industry. In the Britain of 1985, riven by a miners’ strike and by continuing unease over the siting of American nuclear weapons on British soil, “Edge of Darkness,” all downpours and dour moods, felt true to its title. (And people were haunted by the Eric Clapton score.) To nudge it closer toward documentary, Campbell showed us Emma, on her final night, chairing a political meeting that was addressed by a real-life Member of Parliament. The new film, unrolling in a prosperous city, and released at a time when some environmentalists are arguing in favor of nuclear power, settles for the stale conceit of an honest soul confronting a venal private sector. Emma worked at Northmoor, a firm that conducts nuclear research under government contract while quietly building a few weapons, for foreign buyers, on the side. (Not, I would venture, the most plausible part of the story.) We know this before being told, because Northmoor’s chairman is played by Danny Huston, who, being a Huston, is so lofty, fine-mannered, and molasses-voiced that he might as well wear a T-shirt with the words “Do Not Trust This Man” picked out in plutonium.

In short, where the old “Edge of Darkness” was an ordeal, digging up surreal images from the conspiratorial murk, the reboot is an adventure—an efficient, politically inert fantasy that uses the hammer blow of violence to palm itself off as pertinent and gritty. The Craven of twenty-five years ago, searching through his daughter’s bedroom after the murder, found a vibrator, a gun, and a Teddy bear; the Craven of 2010 comes up with just the gun. That says it all. As if in deference to the story’s roots, we also get a mysterious and dapper Cockney (Ray Winstone), who is brought in—by whom, we never find out—with the sole purpose, as he admits, of making everything unintelligible. Well, mate, you done that all right. I liked the pace and the pulse of the film, but it launches no genuine surprise and, despite being irradiated with scenes of sickness and morbid one-liners, has little afterglow. Compare a work like Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat,” which also showed a cop and his loved one assailed by the forces of grand corruption; where Lang left his anxious viewers in no doubt that society could chew up the best of them, Campbell leaves us thrilled yet reassured. One man, it seems, can stanch the flow of evil—not difficult, perhaps, when the evil isn’t half as forbidding as the man. Gibson is the best thing about “Edge of Darkness,” at once despairing and decisive, although I’m not sure he was wise to agree to the scene where Craven says to a bigwig, “You’d better decide whether you’re hanging on the cross or banging in the nails.” Sorry, Mel. That was the other movie.


REVIEW: ‘Edge of Darkness’ Takes You to the Edge of Boredom
by John Nolte
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
January 29, 2010

It’s sure nice to have Mel Gibson back on the big screen carrying a gun, seeking revenge for the death of a loved one and quivering with righteous rage. But after seven years off-screen what a shame he couldn’t find a better script. “Edge of Darkness” is a mess. Convoluted, poorly structured and lacking in the important emotional turning points and character moments necessary to make this kind of thriller work.

Gibson plays Boston Police Detective Thomas Craven, an honest cop and inattentive but loving father whose 24-year old daughter Emma comes home for a visit. Things are warm, if a bit strained between them, but she’s ill — violently ill — and on their way out the front door to the hospital she’s shotgunned in a drive-by shooting that was meant to kill him. Or was it?

The plot’s entirely too ambitious, involving defense contractors, corrupt Senators, leftist activists and a gentle yet menacing wine-sipping government fixer named Jedburgh (The Mighty Ray Winstone) whose loyalties shift all-too obviously when the plot requires a nudge — when the screenwriters are stuck. In the “Austin Powers” trilogy he would’ve been called Agent Exposition.

Wintsone continues his perfect record of making everything he’s in better, and Jedburgh is a very interesting character. You do want to know more about him. The problem is that there’s no natural place for him in the film’s narrative. He reminds me of Liev Schreiber’s mysterious John Clark in “The Sum of All Fears.” Another movie where a mysterious supporting player in a disappointing film comes off as though he’s visiting from a much better movie.

The “reluctant” witnesses are just as poorly crafted as exposition machines as Jedburgh. They’re only reluctant enough to come off as reluctant in that contrived kind of way that tells the audience Big Scary Things Are Afoot. Of course they all eventually talk, with their only motivation seeming to be the need for a plot turn.

Movies can survive these kinds of problems, though. The secret is to keep a strong hold on the trajectory of your protagonist, and that’s where “Edge” fails most. The required moments don’t exist to bring this story to life. Craven discovering his daughter was the real target should’ve hit like a ton of rocks that turned the entire narrative on its head. Instead the realization arrives courtesy of a standard A to B to C police procedural.

The other moment most unforgivably missing (that the film’s trailer promises) is when Craven’s pushed to the point where he stops being a cop, starts serving out a violent reckoning, and never looks back. Instead these unsatisfying action bits come in maddening fits and starts. In once scene Craven’s kicking a little ass, in the next he’s a cop again. You keep waiting for that vicariously satisfying turning point where Mel Gibson does what Mel Gibson does best but all you get is one long frustrating tease.

Director, Martin Campbell, the competent helmer of “Goldeneye” and the splendid Bond-reboot “Casino Royale,” adapted “Edge” from a five hour Australian miniseries of the same name that he directed back in 1986. And that may be the problem. Cramming five hours of intrigue into two hours was a mistake and the end result is too much plot at the expense of the simplicity these kinds of films require:

Daughter’s killed. Find killers. Begin Rampage.

“Taken” it is not. There’s not even a single memorable action scene, and for a Mel Gibson film it’s surprisingly humorless. The only comedy comes from how hard the plot strains to let the audience know the villains are bi-partisan – both Democrats and Republicans.

But, hey, Mel’s back. And that is one very welcome turning point.

Tags: 'Edge of Darkness', Casino Royale, Martin Campbell, mel gibson, Ray Winstone
Posted Jan 29th 2010 at 6:15 pm in Featured Story, Film, Reviews