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Edge of Darkness review
[Thu 06/05/2010 03:28:54]
By Nick Dent
Mel Gibson's ‘comeback' movie - his first starring role since 2002's Signs - is a lamentable adaptation of the ambitious 1985 BBC series about nuclear nightmare in Thatcher's Britain.
It's always a sad day when Hollywood travesties something beautiful, but in this instance it's veteran director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) who has sullied the memory of his own stellar TV work. Exactly why Campbell thought his complex, sprawling, mystical miniseries written by the late Troy Kennedy-Martin would make a great basis for a dumb vigilante picture remains to be seen, but the task has eluded the distinguished talents of screenwriters William Monahan (The Departed) and Andrew Bovell (Lantana). After a promising start the movie quickly reaches a critical mass of pure cheese.
Tom Craven (Gibson) is a Boston cop stricken with guilt when his 24-year-old daughter Emma (sloe-eyed Aussie Bojana Novokovic) is gunned down outside his home. Craven thinks it's a botched attempt on his own life by a resentful convict, but Emma's been working at a nuclear facility headed up by Bennett (Danny Huston) and her murder coincides with the deaths of three environmental activists who recently broke into the place.
Geez, I wonder who killed them? What was intriguing over six televisual hours is reduced to mind-numbing obviousness here, with terrified witnesses knocked off everywhere Craven turns while he remains miraculously unscathed by the sinister men in black vans whose problems would all be solved if they just offed Craven.
The welcome appearance of Ray Winstone as a mysterious cockney agent leads straight into a dramatic cul-de-sac, and looming over it all is the nagging sense that Gibson has fallen straight back into the rut of playing the Decent Guy Out for Revenge that stretches from Mad Max to Lethal Weapon to Hamlet, Braveheart and Payback. Edge of darkness? More like total eclipse of the brain.
