Mel Returns As a Man on the ‘Edge’

After an astonishing eight-year absence from the big screen, Mel Gibson—at one time the biggest movie star in the free world—is back in action in Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness, an adaptation of his own 1985 BBC miniseries. Mel’s a little older, he’s lost some hair and gained some cragginess…but he still has that propulsive beast inside of him, and it’s hungry for some revenge.

Mel plays Thomas Craven, a veteran Boston detective whose 24-year-old daughter Emma is brutally—I mean, brutally—gunned down while home for a visit. As soon as he picked her up from the train station Craven could tell there was something wrong with his daughter. She was bleeding from the nose and vomiting and clearly had something she was keeping from him. Craven’s fellow officers believe that Emma was collateral damage in an attack meant for Craven, but after examining his case files and coming up with no connections—not to mention finding a gun that his daughter was carrying—Craven begins to believe that she was the target after all, and whatever she didn’t get to tell him is what got her killed.

His tortured investigation into his daughter’s death leads him to shady government dealings, political corruption and cover-ups—in other words, the standard conspiracy movie elements. That’s one of the main problems of the movie: all of the elements are recycled but not refashioned. I love this genre and I love the ingredients and expectations that are supposed to come with it…but a really good movie takes those elements and puts a signature stamp on it. Michael Clayton (funnily enough, Denis O’ Hare plays a corporate sleazeball in both movies) is a great recent example. It took the conspiracy genre conventions that you want to see and elevated them to seamless art. But Edge of Darkness always makes you aware of them. Campbell—working from a script by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell— just doesn’t quite pull it off, even though he’s a solid director with legitimate action chops (he saved James Bond twice with Goldeneye and Casino Royale).

Besides accepting the bland script elements, Campbell has some pacing issues and makes a couple of directorial choices that felt a little cloying to me. The main one is having Craven not only see, but talk to visions of Emma from beyond the grave. I understand that for the movie to work we really have to feel Craven’s hollowed-out emptiness, his utter loss…but this technique comes off as false and theatrical. Four Brothers, which could have been a really fun movie, did the exact same thing and it killed it for me in that case as well.

As the lights went down and the Warner Bros. logo came up, knowing I was there to see Mel Gibson play a cop with a wild streak…it was impossible for me not to think of Lethal Weapon. Lethal Weapon is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time. It is one of the films that made me want to become a director, and I don’t care what all the hard-to-please sourpusses say, I loved the three sequels tremendously. They were all slickly directed by that fantastic Hollywood craftsman Richard Donner and they all worked hard to keep developing the characters. They were believable and genuinely funny but also emotionally involving and electrifying. I think Lethal Weapon is the greatest action movie ever made, with Die Hard being a very close runner-up.

I still remember going to see Lethal Weapon 4 in the theaters on opening day 1998 like it was earlier today and not twelve years ago. The ending of that movie…when Danny Glover wakes up after having been knocked out by Jet Li, quickly realizes instinctively that Mel is trapped underwater by the wedge of concrete, dives down to save him, puts his arm around him and pulls him up to the surface while Michael Kamen’s incredible score crescendos…I cry like a baby every time I see it. No no no wait, that’s putting it too far…what I meant to say was that every time I see it, I shed a couple of subtle, very masculine water sprinkles…Man Tears. Yeah, that’s it.

Now why am I talking endlessly about Lethal Weapon instead of Edge of Darkness? Because truly, even for non-fanatics like me, it’s impossible to watch Edge of Darkness without thinking of Lethal Weapon. There’s just something wrong about seeing Mel Gibson play a Warner Bros. cop that isn’t Martin Riggs, especially because Craven, like Riggs, is shaped by losing a loved one to a violent crime and has several Riggs-esque moments. Gibson remains a very charismatic performer, and he makes you see how haunted Craven is. Whether he’s interrogating people and probing them with his piercing eyes or pointing a gun at them and trying to keep his sheer palpable rage from turning him into an animal, Gibson draws you in and delivers the goods.

There are four or five scenes where Mel pounces and kicks some ass that had me cheering in my seat, especially the furiously bloody climax…but Craven is still Riggs-light. And I don’t just mean because there isn’t nearly as much action in Edge of Darkness as there is in a Lethal Weapon movie. No, the problem is that Craven isn’t nearly as complex or layered a character as Riggs. I would watch Riggs in Lethal Weapon 72, but Craven…even if a sequel were possible…I don’t really care about him. Craven isn’t a complete portrait like Riggs was.

For example, we know that Craven lives alone and that Emma’s mother has been out of the picture for so long…but we never learn why. The mother is never addressed. Did she divorce Craven? Die? We don’t know. Craven and Emma weren’t all that close and he never visited her even though she didn’t live far away…why? What kind of a cop was he? What cases did he clear? What was his history in the Boston Police Department? The only interesting things we learn about him are that he’s a veteran (also like Riggs) and that he doesn’t drink. That’s a start but it’s not enough.

The supporting cast is good. Relative newcomer Bojana Novakovic is very appealing as Emma, and Danny Huston as the heavy is almost as delightfully slimy as his father was in Chinatown. Ray Winstone, who plays the film’s most intriguing character Darius Jedburgh—a government cleaner/fixer—is delightfully ambiguous and nails every scene he is in. His part was originally to be played by Robert De Niro, but De Niro left the set (read: was fired) over “creative differences” a couple of days into shooting. Winstone is more than an adequate replacement. Finally, Damian Young is nearly as repulsive as he was on the first season of Californication, even though his role as a senator is a caricature.

Howard Shore did the music, which is solid but nowhere near as haunting and elegiac as his score for Cop Land. It seemed a little rushed and perfunctory, which makes sense, as I discovered that he was a replacement composer brought in at the last minute after the movie did some re-shoots and the producers decided they didn’t like the original score.

Any attempt to make some sort of political commentary fails. I had fun recognizing several of the Boston locations they used…but what really pissed me off? In a couple of otherwise very well-coordinated fight scenes, Mel was using an obvious stunt double. Mel could have easily done the stunts and he should have. But in interviews for years all he has done is whine about having to quit smoking and about being too old to do action anymore. That’s why he refused to do the new Mad Max movie and Lethal Weapon 5…even though Riggs was his best character and bread and butter and apparently there was a great script for it written by original Lethal Weapon scribe Shane Black. He’s doing some other movie with Black soon, and he’ll probably use a stunt double in that one too. Whatever buddy. Hey Mel, news flash: if Bruce Willis and especially Stallone, Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood (all of whom have at least a decade on you) can still do most of their own stunts and look awesome, you’ve got no excuse. You’re cheating moviegoers, and you of all people are in no position to skimp if you’re trying to revive your career after the PR debacles and image tanking you’ve caused in the last few years.

Edge of Darkness is a decent comeback vehicle for Gibson and it’s worth seeing if you missed him as much as I have…but it can’t hold a candle to recent conspiracy thrillers like Michael Clayton and State of Play (also adapted from a BBC miniseries, and much better) or Mel’s own revenge and/or cop and/or conspiracy movies like Lethal Weapon, Ransom, Payback or Conspiracy Theory.