Edge if Darkness Grade: C
His status as a human notwithstanding, a Mel Gibson-helmed thriller about a father seeking justice for the daughter who died in his arms sounds like an exciting idea. In practice, however, “Edge Of Darkness” is a middling and fruitless mystery that takes itself far too seriously.
In trying to add filler and increase the seriousness of “Darkness,” director Martin Campbell produced a film afraid to edit itself. The better part of two very long hours involves whole scenes that seem to serve no purpose other than to stroke someone’s ego. Plot points that are introduced and warrant further discussion are never satisfactorily addressed again, and whole subplots come and go under the audiences’ nose for seemingly no reason other than to satisfy the film’s obsession with trying too hard.
Among the film’s most overdone labors is trying to find and define itself as a movie. Billed as a conspiracy and revenge thriller, it is mostly a mystery, but also a drama that occasionally decides it wants to be a thriller, masquerading as a half-hearted conspiracy story.
Gibson plays Tom Craven, a Boston detective who watches his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) get gunned down. His ensuing investigation into her death and the company for which she worked leads him down the tried and, in this case, not-so-true path of government conspiracies and corporate cover-ups.
The film tries to be a thriller, occasionally bursting into gruesome violence that dissolves as quickly as it started. Interestingly enough, the few points of violence are too violent. Bullet holes gape and blood gushes, and, while sometimes movies don’t show enough gore, “Darkness” shows too much for what it bills itself as. Instead of focusing on the violence and energy of the scene, the camera tends to linger on the wounded. When staring at the victims, one wonders if the makeup artists were bored and begged the director for permission to make the corpses a great deal more viscerally mutilated than they needed to be. Amid the gore, “Darkness” loses itself once again, not playful enough to be satire, not nearly suspenseful enough to be horror and certainly far too full of its own seriousness to be comedy.
Featuring a decent cast — including Ray Winstone as a government operative who crosses paths with Craven — much of the character interaction feels forced. Virtually everyone speaks in a Boston accent, and almost no one seems to know their character or their scenes past the most artificial level. Characters hug, reveal menace or express camaraderie, but rarely does it feel truly real.
Unfortunately, most of the two-hour film is not thriller, but instead supposedly dramatic mystery as Craven delves deeper and deeper into a world that becomes less clear and more boring as the film chugs ever-so-slowly along. At the end, we think we know what happened, but we don’t really care.
This is Campbell’s second crack at “Edge of Darkness,” having directed a British series of the same name and virtually the exact same plot set in the United Kingdom back in 1985. A quarter-century later, very little of the core plot has changed and the achingly slow moving story has not aged well.
“Edge of Darkness” had everything going for it but ultimately failed to realize its own potential. The action is sparse, the admittedly capable cast moves along to a tedious plot and the sense of conspiracy and intrigue induces more headache than interest.
You can reach this staff writer at bkoenig@theeagleonline.com.
