2-04-10 Movie Review - Edge of Darkness

Two noncommercial movie showings between today and next Wednesday, and one of them is pretty special. Not that tomorrow's French movie at the Murdock isn't pretty special in itself: it's Mon Oncle, Jaques Tati's funniest movie, with very little dialogue and myriad sight gags, especially involving a ridiculous supermodern house with ridiculous supermodern features, and if my memory serves, some very funny dogs. Mon Oncle shows at 7:30 in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway, tomorrow.

But the really special show is next Monday, with a transgendered director whose brother is the grandson of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, and a movie the director made about the brothers called Prodigal Sons; and the director will be present for discussion. Prodigal Sons will show on Monday the 8th at the Murdock, still 536 North Broadway at 7.

And commercially, Mel Gibson does his first acting in seven years in Edge of Darkness.

I am apparently among the many reviewers who wonder why, after seven years offscreen, Gibson chose to return in such a piece of boiler-plate.

Edge of Darkness is the same old revenge melodrama about the lone man with a personal grudge going after the people who have done him harm, and using the methods of Jack Bauer in 24 with no concern for the law or the Constitution; it carries the usual movie suggestion that none of the agencies of democratic society can handle a really difficult situation and that only vigilante justice will do. Both the good guy and the bad guys work primarily by shooting people, and the people shot bounce back like Sam Peckinpah characters and spray blood on the walls. And the trail of villains climbs upward and upward to the peaks of society and government, stopping just below the president of the United States. I'd accuse myself of giving the plot away if it weren't that everybody who goes to action movies is going to spot the cliches and stereotypes right from the start anyway. But I will try to avoid anything more along plot lines.

Gibson is a cop who may have respected the rules until he was personally attacked, but he belongs to a force that operates in peculiar ways, letting him investigate his own problems without a partner to keep an eye on procedures. None of the old Gibson charm and wit is even suggested, and his character goes from numb grief to manic fury with almost nothing between, which doesn't make for much of a character study and doesn't call for much subtlety in acting: Gibson may have chosen Edge of Darkness partly because it's in an almost surefire genre piece and easy to do.

Supporting characters are mildly interesting only because of Ray WInstone as one of those ambiguous sinisters such as you don't know whose side he's on, but his role is too stock for him to do much with. There is no real heroine, and nobody else is at all distinguished as either character or performer.

But Edge of Darkness will satisfy the considerable number of thriller-goers who seek nothing more than a rapid succession of violent action scenes involving a nearly fascist action hero demolishing truly vile bad guys in a plot that may hang together better than my sorry ears were able to detect, what with all the sinister mutterings and whisperings and a cast of characters who keep turning out to be not what we were supposed to think they were.

January and February are months in which the movies dump their least impressive products all over the screen; we're probably in for a lot worse stuff than Edge of Darkness.