YouSeenThat.com: Film Review
Edge of Darkness
by Jamie - February 8th 2009
“Get the man a ginger ale... STAT!”
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What the hell are we doing with our lives? It was a rainy Sunday night, and this was the best thing we could find to entertain ourselves? Days later and we still aren’t even sure why we bothered with Edge of Darkness. If the lacklustre trailer was anything to go by, we already had a mega-Humphrey-Bogart-hunch-of-epic-proportions that Gibson's latest bore all the hallmarks of a second-rate detective noir throwback. Think Stephen Seagal levels of ordinary. The sort of garbage that should be immediately restrained, read its last rites, exorcised and buried in the straight-to-video graveyard known as your local Blockbuster. Sadly, we weren’t too far off. Sigh. Okay, to be honest, we had the choice of watching either Edge of Darkness, or Invictus. We knew that Invictus would have been the superior film, you can’t go wrong with Clint Eastwood at the helm, but fuck it, we really weren’t in the mood for all that upbeat, feelgood bullshit. It's a Sunday! We've got to go to work in the morning! Screw being upbeat and positive. Okay, sure, in hindsight it wasn't the best way to spend our $14, but what's done is done... so, urg... our Edge of Darkness review.
Edge of Darkness centres on Detective Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson), an honest Boston cop who is forced to deal with the unimaginable - investigate the murder of his activist daughter (Bojana Novakovic). Killed in what initially appears to be an assassination attempt on her father, Craven uncovers not only her secret life, but a corporate cover-up and government collusion that attracts a mysterious agent tasked with cleaning up the evidence.
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On paper, Edge of Darkness appears like it could have been a pretty decent detective-themed throwback. Just look at the cast: a drawcard like Mel Gibson in the lead, a veteran tough guy like Ray Winstone skulking around wasting people like its cool, and the slick Danny Houston typecast in his typical role as a douchebag in a suit. It had potential. The problem with potential, as we all know, is that potential is often flushed down the toilet at the drop of a hat in good old Hollywood. The point of failure for Edge of Darkness was that the writers took a fairly traditional tale of justice and revenge, and to their credit, they tried to impart a modern spin on it. The problem was though, that the film seemed to fall into a giant steaming heap of ‘who-the-fuck-cares’. Without spoiling too much of the plot, Craven finds out that his daughter was working for a secretive Research and Development company that specialise in making nuclear weapons, and from there it all gets a bit convoluted/stupid/boring/yawn-inducing and generally a whole load of the aforementioned ‘who-the-fuck-cares’. Urg... it really was hard to care.
Maybe the fact that we were the only two people in the cinema should have been taken as some sort of omen?
From what we understand, Edge of Darkness was actually based on an "excellent" 1985 English mini-series. It's to be noted that we're doing invisible airquotes around the word 'excellent', since we haven't actually watched the original television series. If we were to make a leap in logic, given how piss poor Gibson's attempt at the remake was, we can only imagine that the Yanks have screwed the pooch on this one, and did their best to butcher another quality piece of entertainment from Mother England. That's how those fuckers at the film studios roll. They take great foreign stories and concepts, and just shag them stupid like a bunch of muppets on a Contiki tour. Shag them to the point their dicks are about to drop off from overuse.
Okay that crap aside, we love Bogart films as much as the next guy... well, assuming the next guy loves Bogart films... and while it’s great to see more modern detective-themed thrillers hitting our screens, we aren’t entirely sure how Edge of Darkness attracted the likes of Mel Gibson. Think about it, the guy hasn’t taken a lead role in a film since Signs back in 2002, and to be honest, that really wasn’t a lot to write home about then. Fucking half-drunk glasses of water defeating aliens... shit, that premise is almost as limp as our tiny, malformed dicks. Seriously? You’d think that after an absence of nearly eight years from in front of the camera, Gibson would want to do something really amazing – for all we know, he could get hit and killed by a bus tomorrow... ironically he’d probably get hit by a pack of retired Jewish film producers on their way to one of their secret ‘How We Control Hollywood’ meet-and-greets. Anyway, we digress. The point is, Edge of Darkness is hardly a career defining piece of cinema, let alone any sort of emotive exclamation point at the end of a lifetime in the business, a.l.a. Clint Eastwood in ‘Gran Torino’. At a guess, this was probably just another film by Mel’s production company, but given that we are so disinterested in this film, we can’t even be bother IMDB’ing it, let’s just go with that. Maybe he wanted to save a few bucks hiring a real actor?
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Possibly the one saving grace in this whole boring turd of a film was the character of Jedburgh, played by veteran British actor Ray Winstone. Jedburgh is the secretive English agent who usually goes out of his way to clean up the mess left by sloppy individuals, but due to a new perspective on life, his motivations may not be as simple to figure out as we first think. Winstone's character was interesting and kept us intrigued, but then again, we’ve always had a raging hard-on for spy/mysterious agent type guys... and compared to the multitude of the paper-thin characters floating through Edge of Darkness, Winstone’s presence not only served to capture our attention, but he held it - even if he was just a shoehorned-in character from the English television series with little or no place in the US film. Jolly good work, old son. Oh, and for the trivia buffs, apparently the role of Jedburgh originally belonged to Robert DeNiro – that was until he allegedly had some ‘creative differences’ after a few days on set. Yeah, we’re guessing he also twigged to how completely bloody ordinary the film was... but then again, Bobby has been in a lot of shite recently. Fuck, how could you go from Goodfellas to Rocky and Bullwinkle in the space of a decade? Seriously? We’re not joking. Please, if anyone can tell us, scribble your answer on the back of an A5 postcard and address it ‘Where Did DeNiro Go Wrong’ care of PO Box 696969. Honestly, we’re buggered if we know.
Overall, Edge of Darkness had potential. The film had a solid cast, but at its core, Edge of Darkness came off as a very mediocre detective-thriller that falls into a heap toward the end. Despite the fact Gibson has become a bit of Hollywood pariah of late, we really hope that this pile isn’t the last we see of Mel Gibson as an actor - if Edge of Darkness is his swansong, jeeze, it would be incredibly disappointing. Save your hard-earned cash for a better cinema experience, i.e. just about anything. If you really feel the need to watch Mel Gibson fapping around in a trenchcoat for a couple of hours, wait for Edge of Darkness to hit the $1 weekly bin at your local video store. Save it for a really boring weekend. Preferably one of those sleepy, rainy weekends when you somehow couldn’t be bothered curling-up in bed and shagging your Sunday away to some classic tunes from Creedence Clearwater Revival... that’s what we wish we could have been doing instead of watching this steaming load. Sigh. If only we could find some women who were willing to go the starfish for few minutes... hell, even twenty seconds would be sufficient.
The A.D.D. Version:
Edge of Darkness had potential, it had a good cast, but it’s just a very mediocre detective-thriller that falls into a heap toward the end.
Random Observations:
See This Film If You Like:
The YouSeenThat.Com Popcorn Rating:
Meh. Yawn. *drinks some milk*
How does the YouSeenThat.Com Popcorn Rating work?
Well, it works on the theory that the more you enjoy a film, the less likely you are to be aimlessly shoving salty corn kernels into your gob, and a little more focused on what is happening in front of you on the big screen. Therefore, the more popcorn in our scorers bucket, the better the film. Pretty simple, huh?. Think of it as an inverse scoring system.