Jaw-Breaking Boston Detective Unravels His Daughter’s Murder

The last time we saw Mel Gibson in a leading role, he was throwing cold water on alien invaders in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs.” Now after a hiatus spent burnishing his reputation as the world’s pre-eminent director of ultraviolent dead-language epics, he tries a return to movie-star form in “Edge of Darkness,” in which he plays a grieving dad trying to solve and avenge the death of his daughter.


This is hardly new territory for Mr. Gibson, who has spent much of his on-screen career — from “Mad Max” (1979) to “The Patriot” (2000) — looking for paternal payback. Speaking of which: In the bluntly titled “Payback” (1999) he was both the agent of revenge and the principal victim, a situation that at first seems to apply in “Edge of Darkness.” Tommy Craven, Mr. Gibson’s Boston police detective, believes himself to be the intended recipient of the shotgun blast that kills his daughter, Emma. (Her mother, as far as we can tell, departed long ago.) And so he sets out to investigate his own attempted murder.

But it turns out the killer did not miss his target. At the time of her death Emma (Bojana Novakovic) was on a visit home from Northampton, Mass., where she worked for a mysterious technology company. She was packing a pistol and manifesting strange symptoms. Before too long Tommy, who occasionally hears his daughter’s voice and flashes back to her childhood, is undertaking the grim, dogged work of unraveling the conspiracy that led to her killing. This involves showing up at various people’s houses and places of work, accosting them with brusque questions and, when all else fails, punching them in the face.

All else fails quite a bit, which is of course why people buy tickets to a movie like this one. And the director, Martin Campbell, manages, until matters turn completely bloody and preposterous in the third act, to inject a few subtle touches. The best thing about “Edge of Darkness” in the early going is its atmosphere of hushed, pervasive menace. Or maybe that’s the second-best thing: the movie’s chief pleasure is an enigmatic, narratively superfluous fellow named Darius Jedburgh, played with world-weary wit by Ray Winstone.

Perhaps best known to American audiences as the only actor in “The Departed” who did not sprain his tongue attempting a Boston accent (and maybe also as the voice of Beowulf in Robert Zemeckis’s animated version of that Old English tale), Mr. Winstone improves every movie he is in. Jedburgh, who fancies fine wine and good cigars, is a shadowy fixer whose loyalties are uncertain and whose connections go all the way to the top. This means both the United States government and Emma’s employer, Northmoor, whose C.E.O. is immediately marked as a villain by dint of being played by Danny Huston.

Mr. Huston and Mr. Winstone distinguish themselves by appearing to have declined the services of the film’s dialect coach, who incites a riot of Bay State braying from one end of the Mass Pike to the other. As someone who was born — or should I say bahn? — in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I appreciate the special music of New England speech as much as anyone, but honestly, guys, give it a rest. If I had a dollar for every dropped “r” in “Edge of Darkness,” I could finance a sequel.

As it happens, the film is a remake, adapted from a 1985 British mini-series (which Mr. Campbell directed) by the screenwriters Andrew Bovell (“Lantana”) and William Monahan, who Bostonized the Hong Kong policier “Infernal Affairs” into “The Departed” for Martin Scorsese. The original “Edge of Darkness,” which I have not seen, was informed by the nuclear anxieties (and anti-nuclear activism) of its time, and a shadow of this topical concern lingers around Emma Craven’s death. She is described as a corporate whistle blower who also had dealings with an underground group of environmentalist anti-corporate militants evocatively called Nightflower.

Red Herring might be a better name. Even though the big conspiracy involves Defense Department heavies and a United States senator (Damian Young, trying some kind of Brahmin patois in contrast to Mr. Gibson’s blue-collar inflections), “Edge of Darkness” has no politics beyond the usual contest between the aggrieved little guy and the suit-wearing fat cats who think they can get away with anything but don’t know whom they’re dealing with.

The audience does, of course. Way back when — in the days of “The Road Warrior” and the first few “Lethal Weapon” pictures — Mr. Gibson brought a wild, unpredictable streak to his action-hero persona. He traded that in at some point for the haggard, humorless demeanor he shows here, cracking the occasional somber joke on his way to breaking another jaw. Liam Neeson did this kind of parental rage much better in 2008 in “Taken,” which was an unusually lively and persuasive example of the genre. “Edge of Darkness” is reasonably well executed, but its competence reeks of fatigue. Another dead kid. Another angry dad. Another day at the office.

“Edge of Darkness” is rated R — though that letter is rarely pronounced in this super-violent, obscenity-laden motion pickchah.