Edge of Darkness

Mel Gibson is back! Thank the acting gods for a moment please. All right, I may love Mel Gibson a little much but the man has been in some fantastic movies - i.e. "Braveheart," "The Patriot," "We Were Soldiers," cough "What Women Want" cough. Many of us have been waiting since 2002's "Signs" hoping to see Mel get out of the directing chair and flex his acting chops together.

Gibson plays Boston police detective Thomas Craven. Craven is eagerly awaiting the arrival of his daughter, Emma Craven, who has been working for Northmoor, a privately owned company that does research for the US military. It is a typical family reunion in which we learn that Emma is pretty much Craven's entire life. There's no mention of a mother at all. I'm not sure if she died, he adopted Emma or she just kind of showed up on his doorstep as a kid, or whatever. It's Emma's first night back and you already know somethings wrong; she's getting nosebleeds and throwing up and all sorts of gross stuff. Craven rushes to take her to the hospital and as soon as they walk out the door, a masked gunman blasts Emma with a shotgun. She flies back like she was just clotheslined by a low flying 747. The police tell Craven that the gunman was aiming for him, but whose going to fall for that? Pssh not me, and neither is Mel Gibson, especially after watching Emma barf up something awful and take 200 grams of buckshot to the chest.

It may have taken you longer to read that paragraph then watch that scene in the film. Which is great because as much as I love Gibson (a lot), he's not very good at the small talk, and the first 8 minutes of the film is small talk. What Gibson capitalizes on is intense emotion. The man knows how to contort his face into something that just twists your soul as he watches his daughter die. In "Taken" I had to sit through almost 20 minutes of cheesy dialogue before Liam Neeson opened up a giant can of whoopass on European scumbags. "Edge of Darkness" throws you right into the action almost as soon as the opening credits scroll past.

"Edge of Darkness" consistently amazed me with its cinematography. Every action scene is beautifully done, and everything just feels real. Its rated R, but the gore is toned down enough to not make me want to cringe in disgust (I'm looking at you, "Zombieland") but is enough to still convince me that yes, this person was shot and that's probably how they would look if a bullet penetrated their eyeball and exited through their brainstem. My mouth was open enough during this movie in awe of the scenes that I'm pretty sure my moviegoing neighbors thought that might be a permanent condition of mine (it's not).

Well, now that I've written the equivalent of a short story on the movie's good sides, it's time to look at the bad things. The plot of "Edge of Darkness" is incredibly large and can get a little muddled. It is just one of those things that just doesn't feel right within the story. I'll throw out words and let's see if you can connect them: conspiracy, murder, radioactivity, nuclear bomb and, extreme leftist hippie groups. Yeah, I didn't think so.

Much of the plot is lost as well. Some bad company hires this British guy to help clean everything up and whenever he has a conversation with Mel Gibson, almost every word is lost to what I like to call "old man jabber." They just jabber back and forth slurring words - one of those occurrences in nature that catches your attention for a few moments before you realize whatever they're talking about is probably really boring. The sound system in the theatre was perfectly fine, but the way they interacted took away anything that might have explained the plot a little better.

"Edge of Darkness" is a pretty decent flick, entertaining at best and muddled at worst. Definitely go if you love Mel Gibson, and remember: everything is illegal in Massachusetts.

Grade: two and a half stars

-Christopher O'Connell