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PHILIP BARRETT: Let me get one thing out of the way; this is going to sound like I hate Edge of Darkness. I don’t, and truth be told it’s not a terrible film by any stretch. The true enemy of this movie is Warner Bros. marketing department which wants this movie to be Taken 2. The film itself acts like it wants to be, too, and without the success of Taken we wouldn’t have realized it, but it’s not an action film. Will that disappoint the audience going into it remains to be seen, but that’s the main reason this picture left me cold.

Plus1: Edge of Darkness reminded me of last year’s Clive Owen flick – The International, in that they both started slow and built toward a WOW factor with a “I can’t believe they did that” ending. Both movies used real-world drama as the backdrop to help shape the world the stories took place in. If anything, the Warner Brothers (and their sister Dot) are marketing the movie as a detective/action flick where in fact it is an intelligent suspense thriller.

PHILIP: Which it is, and for the first forty or so minutes that was fine. The movie never takes off like it promises and is really selling one particular scene completely wrong. The ending Alex mentions to me felt like it belonged in an different movie altogether. Without giving too much away, it’s the point where the film finally decides it wants to be what the ads promise. It’s out of place, complete with cheesy music to compliment it.

It is a suspense thriller, unquestionably, and maybe if I’d gone in there expecting that I’d have been more pleased with it. I like Martin Campbell, and the man is an artist in how he lends his films an exotic look while still being able to tell a story. He’s not really to blame, as the other culprit is the script by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell (adapted from the TV series by the same name, which was also helmed by Campbell.) It becomes too convoluted for its own good, when it would have worked better had things been kept simpler.

Plus1: : To me, the ending that was used fit and I’m not sure if that was the same ending from the BBC mini-series. However, I’ve watched enough BBC programming to recognize that the ending used was a BBC series-style ending. If anything, I felt that there should have been one more scene after that last scene with a news story detailing the fallout from the events that unfolded and giving some closure to the political thriller that we had just witnessed. I think American audiences are going to feel the same way… a bit let down on the overall closure of the story and not the main character of Tom Craven (played by Mel Gibson).

As for the style and direction of the movie, I thought Martin Campbell did a good job in Americanizing the story while still keeping the BBC feel to the overall product. If I had to complain about the script it would be that they tried to cram too much into a two-hour film. There were a few scenes that seemed out of context early on but made sense later in the movie. The same with Craven’s remorse and sadness over the death of his child…his inner monologue wasn’t able to really be expressed in the short time frame given.

PHILIP: They did, and it over-complicated things that didn’t need to be over-complicated. It’s ok if it’s not Taken 2, but the direction the screenplay went made it seem like it was the “most serious film in the history of everness” when we didn’t need so many twists and turns along the way.

I will say though, Mel Gibson was perfectly cast as Tom Craven. It’s hard to tell whether they cast Gibson just because or if they molded Craven like him, but only crazy Mel (the best kind of Mel, by the way) could be able to pull this one off. He’s enjoyable even when the film drags or also gets too goofy. His demeanor is priceless, surpassed only by his just as goofy Boston accent.

Plus1: Casting a movie like this is just as important as the story itself. Get the wrong actors and no matter how good or great the story is, the acting will take away from the words. Casting Mel Gibson was a stroke of genius. He brought an aged toughness to Tom Craven that gave realism to the character. I’m not sure what was worse…Mel’s mush-mouth Boston accent or the hard to understand Boston/British accent Ray Winstone used as Jedburgh. With that being said, Jedburgh was a character straight out of any BBC drama or American political thriller – the fixer brought in to clean up the mistakes of others. I liked how Craven and Jedburgh shared an unspoken admiration for each other, knowing what each did and looking the other way.

I don’t know if Campbell tried to make this the “most serious film in the history of everness” but he did manage to make a thriller that had me captivated the entire time. Not once was I taken out of the story because of some sappy piece of music or ill-timed musical crescendo, an unneeded action piece or larger then-life-explosion, or worse…the cute kid that ruins all movies.  Everything he did made Edge of Darkness come across as a “this could happen in real life” movie just as he did with 2006′s Casino Royale and from what I could tell from online research, kept true to the original source material.

PHILIP: Winstone was pretty much perfectly cast as Jedburgh, and he’s having a pretty fun time, even if his character is one of the over-complicated matters at hand. Winstone doesn’t try to play one or other, and only a veteran could handle it as well as he does here. The rest of the cast fills in decently, with Bojana Novakovic doing a solid job as Gibson’s daughter. There’s really no problem with the rest of the cast, even rent-a-bad-guy Danny Huston does good, although it appears he’s trying to set a record for how many unintentionally homosexual villains he can play (between this and X-Men Origins.)

Plus1: I liked Edge of Darkness and thought it was a very intelligent movie that didn’t talk down to me. It had a wonderfully executed story that built from a slow beginning to an amazing ending and not once during the movie did the subject take itself too seriously. My only concern is that the moving going public is going to go in, like Philip did, and expect more then what they are given. This isn’t Lethal Weapon and that isn’t an older Martin Riggs. You’re not getting a fast-paced action flick with car chases, gun fights, and loud explosions. You’re getting a stylized political thriller that will make you think and I think that is what many people don’t want when going to the movies. They want to check their brain at the door and relax in a fantasy world for a few hours to escape reality. And as much as I liked Edge of Darkness I don’t see this being on heavy rotation in my DVD collection in a few months.

PHILIP: Pretty much that. It’s not a discredit to the movie that I misplaced my expectations in wanting an action/revenge tale and instead received a mystery. I liked the film enough that I will give it another try on Blu-Ray with this in mind. That said, I think I did enjoy the goofy parts more than the more serious stuff with said expectations. This isn’t a terribly made picture nor is it even a bad picture. It just left me cold because I wanted something else, and what was given wasn’t working for me. It’s a fairly decent little thriller in its own right, and maybe audiences will get more out of it than I did. I’d be more inclined to recommend “checking the brain in” if the movie didn’t fire off such mumbo-jumbo of who’s turning on who. In the end, Edge of Darkness is just a middle-of-the-road thriller that has a nice return for Mel Gibson.

Philip’s Rating –

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