It’s good to know that as a hardline, mediaeval-style Catholic (and auteur of that righteous gorefest The Passion of the Christ), Mel Gibson can still get divorced. He has his own personal Catholic chapel and is dogmatically opposed to the ordination of women, but he also has (or had) a drinking problem and a tendency to get anti-Semitic when soused. Perhaps getting divorced is the least of his worries.
Gibson has also been absent from the big screen, in a starring role at least, since the rather floppy alien-arrival drama Signs in 2002. So his return as a lead actor, in Edge of Darkness, must be reassuring to those fans who hoped he would not retire into mere directing but keep acting until he turns into John Wayne.
Actually, the evidence in Edge of Darkness is that he’s in danger of turning into Charles Bronson, with a face almost as weathered (the young beauty of Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously is long gone) and a revenge plot that requires him to gun down more than a handful of people. But Edge of Darkness is a more substantial film than any Death Wish episode, and Gibson is still capable of imparting to it a solid cinematic presence in the central role.
He plays Tom Craven, a Boston policeman. The fact that he’s a cop is essential to getting the storyline going, in that when his daughter is murdered he is able to do the cop thing and investigate. He’s handy with a gun and he’s got useful skills in the hand-to-hand-fighting department, never mind being able to look things up on his police computer and so forth.
I wondered, watching Edge of Darkness, what the narrative might have been had Craven not been a cop but, say, an accountant or a supermarket manager instead (not that Gibson would deign to play a mere accountant, I’m sure, let alone a supermarket manager). The fact that Craven is a policeman has nothing to do with the mystery itself, but it allows him to pursue the answers to it: basically, it’s a very useful coincidence.
There are other instances where you feel some strain in Edge of Darkness — a straining for effect and, possibly, straining just to make sense. There is one killing that would have to be so perfectly timed that it’s quite impossible at that juncture in the film, except as a random accident (which it’s not), and there are a few other close calls in the plot-rationale department. Why shoot people when you’re poisoning them already? Or, if shooting them is the quickest way to get them out of the picture, why bother with the attempted poisoning in the first place?
It’s odd because the chief mystery in the film is not, in fact, the reason Craven’s daughter is murdered, but who and what Ray Winstone’s character is meant to be. His Jedburgh, some kind of British import into the American skulduggery business, is distinctly ambiguous — and is clearly intended to be so. Jedburgh is scripted as a liminal and ambivalent figure, which partly explains some of what he does, particularly towards the end of the film. Yet, as a rather-too-obvious deus ex machina instead of a personality with an intelligible backstory, Jedburgh might have remained fuzzily out of focus throughout the movie were it not for Winstone’s sheer immediacy as a film actor. He can rivet the attention while apparently doing almost nothing. Afterwards, you can wonder why Jedburgh does what he does, but while watching the film you take him entirely on trust.
The presence of this stray Brit is perhaps a reference to the movie’s origins in the British television series of the same name. It was first aired in the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher ruled Britain and Ronald Reagan the United States. Those two had a “special relationship”, of course, and it was taken for granted that Britain would tow the American line when it came to nukes and so on, that Britain would assist the US in whatever world-dominating and world-jeopardising enterprise it cooked up. This was during the Cold War, remember. It’s amazing, or perhaps not so amazing, how a 25-year-old conspiracy thriller, conceived in another period entirely, can translate so readily to today’s supposedly unipolar world.
As a British series, and set in the Cold War era, the storyline’s sense of weltering conspiracies and cover-ups and the implicit idea that the US’s military interests were the enemy of British freedom and honesty were all quite plausible. In adapting such a series to the constraints of an American movie the US as imperial interloper on British soil is gone, naturally. But plenty of suspicion about American power is still to be had in the history of the past decade or so, not least the American occupation of Iraq on the grounds of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. As the Iron Man films demonstrate in a more superficial way, it’s easy to accept that a privatised military-industrial complex is capable of anything — especially anything bad.
That much is not going to surprise many viewers of Edge of Darkness. But it works rather well as a conspiracy thriller, with the grieving, avenging lone dad-cop at its centre. It has been rescripted by William Monahan, who wrote The Departed for Martin Scorsese (also set in Boston), and the director is Martin Campbell, who directed the original TV series as well as the first Daniel Craig 007 movie, Casino Royale. Monahan gives the dialogue some zing, and Campbell is good at keeping the tension at a reasonably high level while pushing ahead with the action, the chases and gunplay.
Most surprisingly, perhaps, is that Gibson as Craven is capable of eliciting as much sympathy as he does — even from viewers who are by now suspicious of his love of violence and the self-conscious brutality of his films as director. Get over his nice-daddy schtick at the start and his tics as an actor (the way his eyes slide here and there, especially), and he will take you along with him for a pretty engrossing and thrilling ride.