Director: Martin Campbell
Stars: Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston
Tom Craven (Mel Gibson), a Boston Detective, picks his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) up from the airport. Everything seems fine, but she gets more and more ill as the night goes on, so they decide to go to the hospital. As soon as they step outside of his house to do so, a masked gunman shouts "Craven!", and opens up both barrels of a shotgun into Emma's chest, killing her, before driving away. Tom, driven by revenge, begins to look into who would have a vendetta against him, before coming to a surprising conclusion; he wasn't the target. Somehow, his daughter was in over her head in a conspiracy that threatens to consume him as well.
Violent revenge movies are Gibson's bread and butter, and he manages to coast through this one pretty well. Everybody's playing to type: Winstone is scary and gravelly; Huston, slimy and evil as ever; Jay O. Sanders as the concerned cop friend. It's representative of the double-edged sword of this film; you get what you're paying for, but you won't be surprised by anything.
I guess there is one thing you might not expect; this isn't an action movie. It's a thriller in the vein of something like The Firm or The Pelican Brief. Campbell (Who also directed the TV movie from 1985 on which this was based) uses silence, corners, and close-ups in a way that you never know when the next loud jump scare is going to pounce out of the darkness. Effective, but a little cheap. I will say that, while not riveting, he does maintain a certain level of tension for most of the running time.
I kinda dug this flick, and Gibson's performance as a Columbo-like, frumpy detective, until it decided to shit the bed in the last half hour. The believability goes out the window, and it ends with your standard "Gibson as Gun Shootin' Jesus" climax. Yawn.
Do yourself a favor and watch the original film first.
FREDERICK OPINES: MIDDLING
Buy it through Blunderbuss! Edge of Darkness
Edge of Darkness [Blu-ray]
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