Mel Gibson is out for revenge and kills a bunch of people: “Edge of Darkness”

Watching Edge of Darkness is a little like taking a trip back in time to a more innocent age when victory in the Middle East was assured, and Wall Street was still the apex of financial responsibility, and “tea party” meant, well, a party where you served tea.  More importantly, though, it reminds you of a time when Mel Gibson was an actor and not a professional nut job. Ah Mel, you hyper-fundamentalist, hypocritical, anti-Semitic, drunk-driving, Mayan-torturing, Unabomber-beard-sporting, Catholic-obsessed nutcase. We missed you.

In Edge of Darkness, Mel plays Thomas Craven, a Boston detective who witnesses his daughter get blown away as she stands beside him by a killer who shouts his name. Well, his last name. As the investigation proceeds, it quickly becomes clear that his daughter and not he was the intended target. From there he is thrown into a conspiracy that involves arms manufacturing corporations, shadowy hitmen, an enigmatic Deep Throat figure (Ray Winstone), and dumbass eco-warriors. All of it amounts to little beyond a father’s quest for revenge, but on that level it works just fine.

Much of the success of the film is attributable to director Martin Campbell, who rebooted the 007 franchise with Casino Royale, and he brings the same reality-anchored realism to this entertainment as well. Campbell may not be a great director, but he’s a talented craftsman of the type we don’t see much anymore. He knows how to set a scene and how to manage some very talented slumming actors. Most importantly, though, he grounds his action set-pieces solidly in reality. Just as Casino Royale eschewed overblown stunts for more brutal fisticuffs and gunfights, Edge has a welcome adherence to the laws of the physical world.  After a furious, minute-long fistfight that ends in a stalemate, both Mel and his opponent are so physically spent they can barely stand. Watching that scene made me ponder the last movie that portrayed a fight as being physically taxing. I couldn’t come up with one.

It helps that Campbell has an overly-talented cast at his disposal. Danny Huston shows up as a complete lunatic/corporate baron who is pretty clearly the main baddie from scene one. His wingnut performance is so off-kilter and menacing it easily compensates for the script’s lack of suspense. Sure, you know he’s the bad guy, but you still watch all of his scenes wondering what he’ll say or do next. Will he torture a guinea pig to prove a point? Distend his jaw and devour one of his underlings? In one scene he begs Craven to tell him what it feels like to lose a child, and his ethereal performance makes your skin crawl.

As Jedburgh, the enigmatic fixer, Ray Winstone eschews his usual “Hey-let’s-grab-a-pint” persona he deployed in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull, and instead parcels out remorse and iciness in equal measure. It’s clear he knows where all the pieces are on the chessboard, but we’re never sure which ones he’s moving or why.  In his own bizarre way he also provides the film’s heart (if not its soul) in his crackling scenes with Gibson: “You know the worst part about not having any children? No one to bury you.”

Ultimately, though, it’s Gibson who carries the movie, and he does so with a certain fearlessness that indicates he’s well aware of the baggage he carries as a celebrity. He’s unafraid to took his age, and his face’s lines and cragginess helps sell his Tom Craven as a haunted man.  There’s absolutely no vanity in his performance, even showing of his relatively diminutive stature in several wide-angle shots where he acts beside performers who are much taller than he is. He doesn’t have a lot of range—several times he falls back on some Lethal Weapon-era mannerisms—but he also never tries to charm the audience with whatever vestiges of boyishness he may have left. The one-time “Sexiest Man Alive” never projects any kind of sex appeal. Nor does he try to enlist the audience’s support in his increasingly-violent methods. He halfway-sells his character’s working-class Beantown background, but his even when it falls flat, Gibson makes up for it by projecting the tired-eyed fatigue of a man whose best times are behind him, never to be seen again.

Edge of Darkness began its life as a BBC mini-series (also directed by Campbell), and that turns out to be a double-edged sword. There are countless plot-points that could have been expanded. Craven figures out that his daughter—and not he—was the killer’s target too quickly to generate any suspense. The bad guys are identified early, as I mentioned, and the conspiracy at work seems hemmed in as a result. Finally, the climax is ungainly and sometimes illogical. The plot lines don’t really unfold to a conclusion so much as simply terminate in a hail of gunfire. Finally, time constraints mean that the breadth of Craven’s pain and loss are never quite communicated as well as they could have been.

The upside, though, is that the movie is fairly dense on plotting and detail and turns out to be much smarter than your garden-variety thriller. Credit has to be given to screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Blovel for bringing some genuine nuance and texture to the film. Gibson and Winstone’s interactions devote as much time to pondering parenthood as they do to explaining the conspiracy. In one scene when Craven is interviewing one of his daughter’s friends, he has a rambling digression about how his daughter aspired to greater things than he and her mother had wanted for her. It’s a great character moment that perfectly captures a parent comprehending their child’s full agency.

So, Edge of Darkness isn’t a great film, but it’s a solid and smartly-made one. It’s smarter and better-made than 90% of what’s out there. It also marks an interesting potential second-act for Gibson. Maybe he has a career path left for himself as actor after all. Provided he doesn’t do anything else crazy. What do you suppose the odds are of that? I give it, maybe, three to one.