Edge of Darkness

Inthe pair of emotionally contradictory images that open Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, swollen corpsessurfacing on a moonlit river are followed without pause by grainy home video ofa little girl playing in the surf. A line is drawn between those images soonenough. The little girl in the surf, Emma Craven, has grown up and graduatedfrom MIT. Emma (Bojana Novakovic) has something to do with those corpses. Andby the end of the second scene, she is lying dead in the strong arms of herdad, Boston police detective Tom Craven (Gibson), shot down by assassins whospeed away into the rainy night.

Everyoneassumes Detective Craven was the target, a revenge hit for sending someone orother down river to prison. Craven thinks so too, until the evidence beginsadding up to a different answer, a sum of criminality larger and more sinisterthan any case he was ever called on to solve.

Onthe surface, Edge of Darkness issimilar to the vengeance quest that first brought Gibson to worldwideattention, Mad Max, the story of acop who goes beyond the law to hunt his wife’s killers. But Edge of Darkness also has a deeper DNA.Like Robert Aldrich’s classic film noir, KissMe Deadly, Edge of Darknessinvolves a detective who descends along a trail of fear into a murderousunderworld of nuclear trafficking. Emma worked for Northmoor, a governmentcontractor whose mission is classified and whose secrecy its own privatesecurity force enforces. The swollen corpses are activists from a radicalanti-nuclear group. And the federal government has its own interest in policinga situation that threatens to spiral into chaos.

Groundedon Gibson’s familiar persona, Craven is a laconic, sad-eyed man staring warilyat the world from a face carved in stone. He has a soulful side. Like all thegood characters in Edge of Darkness,he owns a turntable and spins vintage vinyl. Intriguingly, in a screenplay thatmixes and matches clever dialogue with patchy plotting and maudlin passages, wedon’t know what happened to Craven’s wife or why he refuses to touch liquor(though he keeps a dusty bottle of whiskey in the kitchen). Just don’t getCraven mad. Those weary eyes will flare into a withering gaze, and thisslightly disheveled, unhappy man will turn into an implacable foe, starringdown speeding cars with a firm grip on his semiautomatic. As the movie beginsto slip from the bonds of probability, he will kill and kill again.

Thefilm’s most fascinating character is a mysterious operative of low cast Britishorigins (Ray Winstone), a cynical yet philosophical man who seems tired ofcleaning up the dirty secrets of America’s government and corporations. Andthere are many secrets in Edge ofDarkness, whose political paranoiarecalls such 1970s thrillers as TheParallax View but with the squealing tires and bloodletting of acontemporary Hollywood action flick. Gibson is older and grayer than in Mad Max, but remains convincing as theavenging angel of justice.