Edge of Darkness (**3/4)

Movies about murdered and imperiled children are often stories about grief when the main character’s a mother (e.g. Changeling, The Deep End of the Ocean, Dead Girl), but are usually about revenge when it’s a man. Liam Neeson in Taken and Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, for example, follow a line that goes back at least to Charles Bronson’s vigilante in Death Wish and through another Gibson thriller, Ransom. Unlike in that movie, the kid can’t be rescued, because she’s been shot by someone apparently targeting Thomas Craven, Gibson’s police detective character. I should say that the “kid” is Craven’s adult daughter. Murdering actual children seems to be one of the few things that are still off limits in mainstream thrillers. Adapted from an acclaimed 25-year-old British miniseries (by the same director, Martin Campbell), this isn’t a slick action film like Taken, or even Live Free or Die Hard, but neither does it weave the murder into a broad narrative, as in, say, Mystic River. Instead, it’s a midtempo potboiler in which a stoic Craven solves the crime as a means to work through his grief, which slowly curdles into rage, with payback his goal. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Payback.)

While nothing seems to be obviously out-of-place or missing from having distilled the five-hour-plus BBC film into a mere 117 minutes, there are hints of condensed storylines. The scheme Craven discovers, involving a corrupt senator and a government contractor, might have been meant as some kind of comment about rapacious corporations, environmentalism, or the role of money in politics, but pretty much gets reduced to a generic paranoid fantasy. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Conspiracy Theory.) One suspects that the mysterious “fixer” played here by Ray Winstone probably made a little more sense in the original production. And when another character implies that Craven hadn’t stayed that close to his daughter before she was killed, that’s another thread that gets dropped. Instead, we see repeated home-movie flashbacks of Craven and the pre-teen version of his daughter. Who knows what happened to the family camcorder in her teen years, or to the girl’s mother, for that matter.

Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale) films his remake with the somber tone of one trying to make a serious movie, but merely winds up with a modestly diverting, occasionally unpredictable mystery.

IMDB link

viewed 1/30/2010 at Riverview and reviewed 2/1–4/10