"Edge of Darkness"

Drama, Thriller, Adaptation and Politics/Religion. Rated R. 1 hour, 56 minutes.

Synopsis: After a homicide detective’s daughter is gunned down on his front porch, he exhausts every opportunity to understand why it happened and bring the perpetrator(s) to justice.

Review: Engaging and entertaining, but the plot gets a little murky at various points in the movie. Poor sound editing and a thick accent from one of the principal characters only adds to that murkiness.

The life of detective Thomas Craven (Gibson) is turned inside out when his MIT-educated daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), is assassinated in his arms during a brief weekend visit. She had something she needed to tell him right beforehand, but she couldn’t form the words as she lay dying on the front porch.

Craven is visibly distraught; fractured to the point that he is asked to take a leave of absence. But everyone in the department assumes that he was the intended target, and since he knows best what enemies he has and who might want him dead, he is allowed to stay on to investigate the murder.

He soon learns that his daughter was working at a defense contractor with its own security detail, as well as some very intense disclosure agreements / requirements for its employees.

The plot meanders a bit as Craven focuses on Emma’s boyfriend, then the company at which she worked. Things get even harder to follow when a man referred to only as ‘Jedburgh’ (Ray Winstone) shows up and starts alternately helping / hindering Craven’s investigation. And the film’s poor sound editing, coupled with Winston’s thick English accent, only make matters worse for those of us desperately trying to unravel this caper before the final scenes of the film reveal what we hadn’t figured out already.

I’d like to write that the acting was solid, but in many cases, it wasn’t. Gibson is satisfactory, Novakovic is good, but Huston is laughable. In fact, in one critical scene in the film, I almost laughed at the horrible job Huston was doing. It would have been wholly inappropriate, because there was nothing funny about the scene. I wouldn’t be surprised if, immediately after the filming of that scene, Huston asked the director if they could take a break from filming for the rest of the day so he could go cash his check.

It is Gibson’s relentlessness that entertains us, and engages the audience long enough to see this film through to the end. I could tell that the ending itself bothered some of the patrons of the theatre in which I saw this film.

Edge of Darkness is a C+. It works as a thriller, and there were even a few sequences in the film that might make you jump.

Photo credit: www.wildaboutmovies.com

Edge of Darkness movie poster