Film Review: Mel Gibson stars in solid murder mystery 'Edge of Darkness'

Mel Gibson is Boston police detective Thomas Craven in the suspense thriller "Edge of Darkness."Warner Bros. Pictures

Out of sight (he hasn't carried a movie since "Signs" in 2002) if not out of mind (the kerfuffle over 2004's "The Passion of the Christ" continues to resonate), Mel Gibson makes a tailor-made return to tough-guy, big-screen stardom in "Edge of Darkness," a potent murder mystery/conspiracy thriller with an aura of old-school gloom.

Directed by Martin Campbell, whose James Bond was a violent Gibsonesque brawler in the 007 reboot, "Casino Royale," "Edge of Darkness" casts Gibson as widowed, working-class Boston police detective Thomas Craven, whose prodigal daughter (Bojana Novakovic) — an employee of a government research facility — is murdered on his doorstep.

Mel Gibson is Boston police detective Thomas Craven in the suspense thriller "Edge of Darkness."Warner Bros. Pictures

Craven's increasingly reckless investigation — "I'm the guy with nothing to lose who doesn't give a (hoot)," he snarls — leads him deep into a conspiracy involving the federal government, nuclear science and a law-breaking, Greenpeace-inspired activist group known as Nightflower. Lucky for us, he encounters many great character actors along the way, including a typically insincere Danny Huston (who shuffles his wedding ring between his fingers, like a magician with a coin, while he talks); the always slimy Denis O'Hare; hulking Jay O. Sanders, as a fellow cop; and the always welcome Ray Winstone as an erudite if thug-accented British assassin/fixer who delivers the story's noir motto to genre fans as if it were a bonbon on a tray: "We all know what the facts are. We live a while, and then we die sooner than we'd planned."

The trailers suggest that "Edge of Darkness" is a bloodthirsty audience-inciter in the manner of the recent "Taken," with Liam Neeson. There are similarities, but "Edge" emphasizes detective work over action, despite a final body count that James Ellroy might applaud.

The film is adapted from an influential 1985 six-episode BBC series of the same name that is considered a modern classic; if you've seen the original, you might object to this Gibson/Campbell revamp. I haven't, so I was able to appreciate the film as a solid, adult thriller.

"Edge of Darkness" may remind some viewers that Gibson came to stardom in the similar role of a vengeful officer in 1979's "Mad Max." The real antecedent here, however, is Fritz Lang's 1953 masterpiece "The Big Heat," in which humble police detective Glenn Ford is galvanized by the murder of his wife into becoming the rogue disrupter of a vast conspiracy of corrupt wealth and politics. As both TEA partiers and Bolsheviks would tell you, narratives about angry, rough-edged men toppling the palaces of power never lose their allure.

— John Beifuss, 529-2394

© 2010 Go Memphis. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.