Highlander Newspaper

Issue date: 2/2/10 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Warner Bros Pictures

After almost eight years of being on hiatus, no doubt working on a few personal problems, Gibson has remerged with a new script and a vengeance to act in "The Edge of Darkness."

This suspenseful movie portrays classic Mel Gibson at his best with his dominating screen presence and superb acting skills.

He plays a tough man bent on bloody revenge in this film, which has the right amount of action, a good storyline and an outrageously delicious amount of blood.

Since "The Edge of Darkness" is a compilation of the wildly popular 1985 mini-series, all the writers for this movie had to do was add in a few terrorist plots to the storyline to make it more intricate and exciting. But it is not just non-stop thoughtless action.

The film is full of fresh ideas and political jargon. Politicians are the bad guys here, doing what they want and murdering anyone that can potentially get in their way.

The film is set in Boston, and although Gibson gets the Boston accent all wrong, he gets the hard-edged detective part completely right.

He is Craven, a retired homicide detective that gets paid a strange visit from his sweet yet sarcastic daughter Emma, played by Bojana Novakovic.

After only a few minutes of catching up, 24-year old Emma starts erratically wheezing and coughing up blood. Craven rushes her out the door to take her to the hospital. Unfortunately, before they even get off the front porch, a black van drives up to the lawn, the man inside yells "Craven!" and then shoots her dead.

Everyone, including his detective colleagues, assumes that Craven was the intended target. After finding a peculiar badge and a gun registered to someone else amidst his daughter's belongings, Craven starts to believe otherwise.

He embarks on a journey to find out what actually happened and why someone would want to kill his daughter. He soon finds out numerous new pieces of shocking information including the fact that his daughter, who lived a secret life, was poisoned by the government with thalium because she was mistakenly flagged as a possible terrorist threat to the United States. Now that the government realizes its error, it comes after him to silence him permanently.

He feels that he has nothing left to lose, and while they are tracking him down and literally killing anyone who converses with him, he starts hunting down people familiar with his daughter's secret life, including the government officials who killed her.

The movie's only problems were the semi-annoying flashbacks that Craven kept having of his deceased daughter. After the first few times they stopped being sweet and eventually became bothersome. Also, the story is a bit disjointed towards the end because of all the action scenes.

Sans the flashbacks and the disrupted storyline towards the end, it is a great movie. The thrill of Gibson's efforts onscreen are guaranteed to make you feel as if you actually got what you paid for: explosive entertainment.

4/5

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools