06/06/10 - Edge of Darkness

Edge of Darkness (2010, 117 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226273/

Another double feature, this time my roommate and I select to give Edge of Darkness and From Paris with Love a go. Really the only reason this one is selected to start the set is because it's longer.

The film stars Mel Gibson as Thomas Craven. Craven's daughter Emma Craven (Bojana Novakovic) comes to visit but shows signs of being sick. As they head to the doctor though, Emma is shot and killed on the porch. The rest of the movie features Craven hunting down his daughter's killer. Along the way he encounters: Jedburgh (Ray Winstone), Jack Bennett (Danny Huston), and David Burnham (Shawn Roberts).

This movie took a drastically different approach from what I was expecting. First, Emma dying in literally the first ten minutes of the film was a shock. I mean, it was obvious this was coming from the trailer, but the movie really started off with this part. It made the entire two hours of the movie fully about Craven's revenge which is what I wanted as a viewer anyway. The other main thing that surprised me in how the movie was presented was the plot but I'll get to that later.

One thing that I really didn't like though about the movie was how the dialogue was delivered. It really seemed like everyone mumbled through their lines a lot of the time. Perhaps this was because I wasn't watching under the best of circumstances. In all honesty though, it didn't seem like an audio problem, but rather just how people were speaking. The main person to blame for this was Winstone as Jedburgh. I liked the character's role a lot but half of what he said I couldn't understand. It made some points of the plot hard to figure out.

As for the plot, it factored much more than I thought it would. I figured from the trailer that this was going to be Taken with Mel Gibson. Instead, it turned out to feature a complicated but interesting plot. I'm actually torn on this issue. I felt it was overall really interesting but I never felt like it put enough emphasis on it to really make me care about Northmoor as opposed to just caring about Craven finding his daughter's killer. I mean, Northmoor does bad stuff (selling nuclear weapons to foreign nations) but I don't think this was adequately conveyed. Maybe that was just me, though, with my audio problems. For me, it left there not being a real "bad guy" but rather just some "not good" guys if that makes sense.

One contributing factor to why this revenge aspect of the plot was so much better handled was because of how Emma Craven was still brought into the movie even after he death. Craven was visibly affected, still hearing her voice and seeing her at various points. I think overall this was done great as, like I said, it made this part of the plot very important. I don't know exactly how the Northmoor portion of the plot could have been stressed more but maybe some "detail things" like this with Emma would have helped.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. Gibson is really good in his role and the plot is surprisingly important. Plus a good action movie.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of Edge of Darkness to a 5/10.]