Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/3/10
Stardom is a double-edged
sword: sometimes we feel better about an actor's work because we
like the persona we see in interviews and at award shows. But sometimes,
what we learn of actors off-screen can work against them, too. Mel
Gibson, one of the greatest movie stars of the 80's and 90's, has spent
the last 7 years in behind-the-camera exile thanks to public backlash against
his blockbuster The Passion of the Christ and a really, really bad
night when he was arrested for drunk driving and responded by raging against
the cops in a series of anti-Semitic slurs. But time heals all wounds,
and the Lethal Weapon finds himself back in front of the camera for the
first time in 7 years as the star of Martin Campbell's remake of his own
1985 BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness. For Gibson, who was
riding high on an amazing streak of great performances in great movies
(Were Were Soldiers, What Women Want and Signs were
his last three leading roles), it's a chance to pick up right where he
left off. Not only does the role provide him with a chance to hit
many of his best notes (virtue, fatherly love, grief and vengeance), but
the movie itself is a first-rate thriller that mixes gunplay, vehicular
homicide and Big Ideas about ethics and our responsibility to the society
in which we live in just the right measure.
Boston police detective Thomas
Craven (Mel Gibson) lives a spartan, lonely life brightened only by his
distant daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic), who graduated from MIT and took
a job with a private nuclear facility called Northmoor. She flies
into town unexpectedly one night and while the father/daughter reunion
is happy, it's clear that all is not well with Emma, who coughs and vomits
more and more progressively until a rush to the ER is cut off by a hooded
assassin who calls out the name “Craven” and shoots her dead. Thomas'
fellow officers, led by Whitehouse (Jay O. Sanders), assume the bullet
was meant for him and investigate accordingly. But he can summon
no true enemies and starts his own investigation down a different track,
digging into his daughter's life, about which he knew surprisingly little.
At Northmoor, he meets with her boss Jack Bennett (Danny Huston), who tells
him she was just an intern but that most of their work is classified.
As he meets her boyfriend (Shawn Roberts) and a friend (Caterina Scorsone),
it's clear they're all intimidated by constant Northmoor surveillance.
A mysterious government contractor named Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) shows
up on Thomas' doorstep being surprisingly forthcoming about his role in
the ongoing cover-up and seems to be testing Craven's honesty and worthiness
to avoid a bullet as part of the clean-up of Bennett's mess. Just
what did Emma stumble upon, and how far will her grieving father go to
avenge her murder and bring the truth to light?
Edge of Darkness sounds
like just another vengeful cop movie, and it is a very good one, but it's
also got a lot on its mind about the times in which we live. Jedburgh
has spent his entire life covering things up for the likes of Bennett and
his government contacts Moore (Denis O'Hare) and Senator Pine (Damian Young).
But recent events have led him to wonder about his vocation, and that gives
a good man like Craven a fighting chance to beat the devil. Our government
and corporate cultures have become so engorged with corruption that trying
to do the right thing is like standing still in a raging river, but Edge
of Darkness gives much more than lip service to the idea that we have
a duty to be just. And that bigger things than success or money ride
on the choices you make (check out that final shot: that's no hallucination
because no one's left alive to have it). Thomas' final line to Bennett
has real resonance, and fans of the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Shooter
will recognize a reprise of one of the best movie lines of the last decade
by Senator Pine.
But most viewers will be
here for a Mel Gibson status report, and other than the shock of seeing
seven years of additional aging on him, it seems like he's never been away.
The man who first came to prominence as “Mad” Max Rockatansky has always
had a special way with the righteous fury that makes revenge thrillers
work, but here we see him play some new notes in that range. Thomas
Craven doesn't just want to return his own suffering, he's very interested
in achieving a justice that seems to no longer exist once you rise above
a certain security clearance. He's also a simple man, and Gibson
wears that lack of contemporary cynicism well. The father-daughter
rapport between he and Novakovic is strong: he Australian by
way of New York and she an Aussie born in Serbia, they make an amusing
pair of Naturalized Australian Bostonians, but the conviction of their
performances overrides any fleeting concerns about that Bahston accent.
Winstone is equally great
as the movie's most intriguing character, a man called upon to evaluate
threats to the Status Quo and then to act, killing whomever he decides
needs to die and tying the whole affair up in so many knots no one will
ever be able to puzzle it out. Edge of Darkness is unusually
smart about the nature of Official Obfuscation, recognizing that the goal
isn't to obliterate evidence, but merely to confuse it to the point where
no one can be charged and no real challenge to the Powers That Be can be
mounted. And Winstone's Jedburgh is more than just a super-cool Cleaner:
he wears the character's confusion at his own stirring ethics brilliantly,
and because he's both so deadly and so conflicted, we're kept wondering
right up to the last moment just what he'll do.
Huston and O'Hare also enliven
what might seem like stock characters, but prove to have a fascinating
edge of reality. All Bennett needs to do is keep Northmoor's secrets
from coming to light, but he's got the homicidal determination of a movie
supervillain, and in the real world that just means more family members
asking more questions, exasperating Moore at every turn. Huston's
become Hollywood's reigning King of Smarmy Power Brokers, but the layer
of grand delusion he drizzles across that persona here is truly delightful.
And O'Hare does a wonderful slow burn as the guy who has to keep asking
why Bennett killed three people when filing the right paper in triplicate
would have accomplished the same goal.
Martin Campbell and I have
not always been on the same page. I've tended to find his action
blockbusters like GoldenEye, Casino
Royale and The Mask of Zorro to be adequate but overpraised.
But here, he's in peak form, eliciting great top-to-bottom performances
and keeping both the suspense and action buzzing, including on of the most
intense shock moments I've seen in years. As I've mentioned, the
script by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell is both clever and profound,
and Howard Shore kicks in a solid, propulsive score.
I can't speak for fans of
the original miniseries, which I haven't seen, and of course those no longer
willing to give Mel Gibson a chance needn't bother. But he couldn't
have picked a better comeback vehicle, both because the role fits him like
a glove and the fact that there's no better star vehicle than a movie that
would be great even without one. And Edge of Darkness is the
first great movie of 2010. |
