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Here’s one of those infobits guaranteed to make you feel old: It has been almost eight years since Mel Gibson has starred in a movie (Signs).
The hiatus probably wasn’t intended to be this long, but the years he set aside to directing (The Passion Of The Christ, Apocalypto) merged into a period of self-imposed downlow after his 2006 DUI arrest and bigoted spiel.
But here’s the thing. Whatever his personality warts, action-film fans couldn’t help but miss Mel on screen. And with $2-billion box office behind him, his return was probably inevitable.
The good news is that Gibson is a lot smarter with his choice of material than with his occasional choice of words. Edge Of Darkness is a remake of an acclaimed ’80s British miniseries, with the original director, Martin Campbell, Americanizing an early triumph.
The source material is smart and action-laden, if not action-packed. And the premise — a father’s investigation of the murder of his daughter leads to murky government and corporate conspiracies — is right in Mel’s wheelhouse, an acting assignment redolent of classic Gibson revenge fantasies, such as Payback and Ransom.
Indeed, the only acting challenge in Gibson’s long-awaited comeback (aside from visibly straining to turn down the volume) is adopting the accent of the movie’s protagonist, veteran Boston cop Thomas Craven.
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And while he’ll never be mistaken for Mark Wahlberg, Gibson does nail down reasonably well one of those “pahk da cah ba da cahb” speed-Bostonian accents favoured by Hollywood dialect coaches.
We’re introduced to doting dad Craven as he meets his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) at the train station (in between reverie flashbacks to her as a little girl). Their reunion is strained, and she’s clearly unwell, coughing up blood. As he finally decides to take her to the hospital, she is gunned down in front of his house.
The cops and media all assume she is an accidental target, and that the bullet was meant for him. But disturbing bits that don’t add up soon have Craven poking his nose where it isn’t wanted.
It all centres around the nuclear facility where Emma worked, a plant run by an arrogant, government-connected businessman named Jack Bennett (the magnetic Danny Huston, one of two scene-stealers in the movie along with Ray Winstone).
Dogging Craven’s every move is a mysterious covert-ops type named Jedburgh (Winstone, moving phantom-like in and out of scenes with surprising grace for someone of his physical stature).
Without getting into the details of the conspiracy, suffice to say that it has been neatly rewritten from a Cold War context into a War on Terror one, and it still makes straight-from-the-headline sense.
For his part, director Campbell (Casino Royale) shows a subtle touch, both with the action elements of the movie and with his star. Made to simmer rather than boil, Gibson seems constantly on the verge of going postal, but never quite. It’s a balancing act that pays off dramatically.
As for the violence, it often seems as if there’s more than there is, courtesy of the way Campbell unleashes the scenes without warning.
If it sometimes seems as if we’ve seen this particular Mel Gibson movie before, well, we haven’t seen it for a long time. And it has aged reasonably well.
(This film is rated 14A)