Film review: ‘Edge of Darkness’ - Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Film review: ‘Edge of Darkness’

Like it or not, violence is a ubiquitous constant in the movies. But there’s violence, and then there’s Mel Gibson.

A distinctive strain of violence runs through much of Gibson’s action-oriented oeuvre. It has an often disturbing note of brutality with undertones of sadism (“Mad Max”), masochism (“Lethal Weapon”) and a dash of Messiah complex (“Braveheart”) often thrown in for good measure.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis make violent films, too — but they usually frame the mayhem in cartoonishly exaggerated terms, with a wink-and-nod, pulp-comics subtext. Gibson’s films, in contrast, usually lack any such irony or self-awareness.

All the Gibson hallmarks are on full display in his latest film, the workmanlike thriller “Edge of Darkness,” which has little new to say but lots of blood to spray.

Gibson is only 54 but looks much older (hard living does that to you), and at this point in his career is all gristle and gravel. That’s fortuitous, because Tom Craven, the crusty Boston police detective Gibson plays, is cut from the same cloth.

Tom’s daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) has just arrived home for an infrequent visit. She’s an MIT grad working as a research intern for Northmoor, a major defense contractor doing hush-hush work for the government.

She seems nervous about something — and has some kind of bug, to boot, retching uncontrollably and bleeding from the nose. Tom insists on taking her to the hospital, but as he opens his front door, a hooded, shotgun-wielding figure blows most of Emma’s midsection back into the foyer, then jumps into a waiting car and vanishes.

Once the initial shock passes, Tom and his colleagues figure the attack was meant for him. But it soon becomes clear that Emma was, in fact, the target.

As Tom delves deeper into his daughter’s life, he learns that she was harboring secrets about her employer — the kind of “national security” secrets deep and dark enough to put her in someone’s crosshairs.

The list of suspects and their accomplices is drawn straight from Hollywood’s stock list of amoral sociopaths, military-industrial division. They include:

• Emma’s tightly wound boyfriend (Sean Roberts).

• A pair of government national security weenies (David Aaron Baker and Denis O’Hare).

• A freelance “fixer” (Ray Winstone) with a terminal illness that gives him a degree of flexibility as to which side he wants to play for.

• The CEO of Northmoor (Danny Huston), as unctuous as he is creepy.

• A corrupt, smooth-talking senator (Damian Young) who’s slicker than fresh bacon grease.

The William Monahan/Andrew Bovell script has Craven plow through the list like a nuclear-powered jackhammer, and each new confrontation is more absurd than the last.

In one scene, Craven smashes the window of the Northmoor CEO’s limo in broad daylight, lays out the driver with a stiff right cross, then climbs in back, sticks his gun under the CEO’s chin and cocks the trigger.

You know, I don’t think so. It’s just impossible to buy into the idea that the Boston P.D. would let this rogue cop, with his major conflict of interest (explained in a single throwaway line that goes by so fast you can’t even make sense of it), run wild like this.

Director Martin Campbell, who breathed new life into the James Bond franchise with his 2006 remake of “Casino Royale,” here tries to reinvent a British television miniseries of the same title that he directed in 1985.

He crafts a few effective shock moments, but overall, the generic “Edge of Darkness” throws off a shopworn “been there, done that” vibe, down to the final scene in which Gibson once again indulges that Messianic streak — with a resurrection metaphor, no less.

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Rated R for violence, language. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@militarytimes.com.