FILM REVIEW: Character assassination

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Edge of Darkness is a remake of a BBC television series of the same name from 1985. The primary action has been transferred from Yorkshire to Boston, and the story necessarily sped up from five-and-a-half hours to just under two. It has Mel Gibson in his first staring role since 2002 (M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs), and the only reason for its existence seems to be a shortage of original ideas on the part of the producers. Gibson, like the show’s Cold War nuclear weapons theme, has not aged well.

Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a Boston cop of 30 years service. His daughter, Emma, (Bojana Novakovic) is killed in a drive-by shooting that initially is believed to have targeted her father. It emerges that Emma was involved in a dangerous conflict with her employers, Northmoor, a privately run nuclear facility working for the US government. Craven, in looking for answers, only finds more and more questions.

The film starts out as an atmospheric thriller, with Craven working through his relationship with his daughter (who appears to him as an apparition) as he searches for the reason why her employers killed her. But the atmosphere rapidly leaks out of the narrative as the pace of the action picks up, and by mid movie, we have Gibson in the familiar role of a father out for vengeance (Mad Max, Payback, The Patriot).

The original mini-series, set in the hey-day of Margaret Thatcher’s prime-ministerial reign, and the controversy of the acquisition of the US-made Trident missile system, is part of a venerable tradition of British TV programs of vaguely left-wing sympathy about government corruption and big money shenanigans. The sense of conspiracy is perfectly effective for its time and place, and the series, though far from perfect, earned a massive reputation for daring to push an anti-nuke, environmental agenda. Another in this tradition that comes easily to mind is State of Play (2003), which received a similar cinematic treatment in a film, released last year, that starred Russell Crowe. Both film adaptations suffer from grasping at fast action to replace an intensifying buildup of character and mood.

It is the leisurely pace, and the digressions that it allows, that made the television original so much fun. In the case of Edge of Darkness the brilliant part played by Joe Don Baker as Darius Jedburgh, the freewheeling CIA agent with a tendency to philosophize about God, golf and the good life, is sorely missed. Gibson’s vengeful father oeuvre is not big on humor, and in the movie treatment, the name Jedburgh has been transposed to a shadowy English fixer played by Ray Winestone, who attempts to provide a sense of intrigue to the story. Alas, this task is too much for any one man, and eventually he too resorts to shooting first and asking questions later.

Whatever one might have thought about the lefty politics of the original, it at least worked within a recognizable political context, and the mystery deepened with the involvement of various amusing cameos that poked fun at players across the political spectrum. For those with no interest in the original series, Edge of Darkness can be considered a perfectly adequate nuts-and-bolts conspiracy thriller, with a strong dose of righteous indignation thrown in. It’s painting by numbers, with the bad guys in dark suits, and the conniving politicians interchangeable with those featuring in any number of similar movies.