Review: Edge of Darkness (2010)

[Tim Skirvin]

  Well, I guess I got the bad January Movie I was hoping for.

  Should I have had any hope going into the movie?  Sure, I found him
quite excellent in the first two thirds of the Kill The Brits Trilogy
(_Braveheart_ and _The Patriot_; I'm still kindof sad he never starred in
_Zulu_), and he did a more-than-adequate job as the lead of action
thrillers like _Payback_ and _Conspiracy Theory_.  But the last blockbuster
he starred in was _Signs_, one of my great movie disappointments of the
last decade.  Was this not a hint?

  Well, it should have been.  _Edge of Darkness_ is a convoluted mess
- not as bad as _Signs_, I suppose, but pretty bad.  It started with some
dream sequences, followed by a bunch of slow, atmospheric detective scenes;
every now and then some shadowy political intrigue was tossed in, and all
of it was punctuated with short, sharp scenes of violence.  This would be
fine, if, say, these pieces fit together in some way.  Instead, we were
treated to the shock of seeing a woman suddenly and inexplicably killed,
and finding that this kind of transition was as good as we were going to
get.

  What went wrong here?  Quite simply, the movie was over-complicated;
it was trying to be a Bourne movie, without the underlying sensibility or
well-thought-out source material.  The plot involved too many characters,
split into too many factions, many of which never interacted.  While there
were many geographical settings, all of these locations were in New
England, and didn't offer much of a sense of diversity.  The "gears within
gears within gears" didn't manage to hold up to the slightest scrutiny.  The
supporting cast was, with one small exception ("how does it feel?"), beyond
generic.  And the viewer was never given any reason to care - well, except
that Mel Gibson was the good guy.

  (At least my instincts on Mel Gibson were good - he can still act,
and even offered a fairly convincing Boston accent for most of the movie.) 

  So, what went wrong?  Well, it became pretty obvious once I
discovered one fact: the movie is based on a BBC mini-series.  Aah-hah!  Not
only did the movie suffer from the standard British-to-American conversion
problems, but it was 1/3 the length!  I'm sure that most of those plot
points could have been properly explored and justified with adequate time.
And if the number of twists in the movie felt like a season of 24, well,
that's probably because *that's what they were going for*.  

  In short: this movie tried to cut down a 5 hour mini-series into a
2 hour movie, and did it very badly.  And sight unseen, I recommend renting
that series before watching this movie.

  I should have seen _Legion_.

  * 3/4

  As a side-note - one of the trailers was for _The Losers_.  I want
this movie to be good, if just to encourage the creation of more Vertigo
Comics movies.  The trailer did not fill me with hope.  Oh well.

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin at killfile.org)
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