Kill and Kill Again

Mel Gibson stars as Mel Gibson in “Edge of Darkness,” a Mel Gibson film not dissimilar to several other Mel Gibson films.

This time out, he’s a cop (check) going outside the constraints of the law (check) in righteous anger (check) to seek vengeance (check) on the vast conspiracy (check) that killed his daughter (check and check).

The conspiracy here is vast and powerful and not always fully explained, but it has something to do with making nuclear MacGuffins and arranging the paperwork so it seems as if they come from other countries. Not that it matters. What is important is that these guys are so bad, they kill everyone twice. Sometimes, they poison you and then they shoot you. On other occasions, they fatally irradiate you and then they drown you. When they try to kill a character by running him or her over (in a bit of stunningly fortuitous timing), the character manages to survive.

Gibson has been down this path many times before, but the role he plays doesn’t seem repetitious so much as familiar (although also, perhaps, unnecessary). Because he is a movie star, we sometimes tend to forget that he is also quite a capable actor, and after some histrionics at the beginning he settles nicely into the role of a deeply grieving father trying to cope with the violent death of his only child.

As he goes throughout the day, he hears her voice and sees images of her as she was when she was about 5. These intimate scenes, heartbreaking in their dramatic irony, are the best in the movie; we share his deep sense of loss when he recalls such a sweet and frisky girl (the young Gabrielle Popa), and we are saddened to think that as a young woman she will be killed twice.

This being a Mel Gibson film, we understand that his grief will be translated into outbursts of furious violence directed at the many people responsible. Gibson is well into his 50s, but he still does violence well. Still, these scenes are the picture’s weak link, and that is probably the fault of the writers, William Monahan and Andrew Bovell. Gibson’s character seems to have a sixth sense about who is a bad guy, and he acts accordingly, even if the villains aren’t doing anything threatening. Yes, he’s a cop and his intuition is finely tuned, but some of this stuff he could only know if he has read the script.

Let’s put it this way: You don’t want to be following him in a black van. Ever.

Much of the information he acts on comes courtesy of Ray Winstone, who is the movie’s most interesting character. Winstone plays a secret, um, well, he’s kind of a contractor who, er, actually, it’s kind of hard to say what he does. But he appears to know everything (which comes in handy when it comes time for exposition), he sees himself as a moral arbiter (that’s the interesting part), he lurks around in scary parking garages out of movies of the ’70s and he is currently working for evil guys who, to their eventual dismay, drive black vans.

The film is based on a highly praised 1985 British miniseries of the same name, and the reason we don’t always understand how Gibson’s character knows what he knows might be due to the adaptation of the source material. The filmmakers had to squeeze more than five hours’ of information into something less than two, and it seems likely that some of the explanations got lost in the translation.

We are just to take it at face value that there is a vast conspiracy and that Gibson can piece it all together. That isn’t too hard a concept to believe, because he’s done it all before.


(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)