CINEMA: Edge of Darkness

This week sees another adaptation, this time from the small screen to the big screen.

More than 20 years ago, Edge of Darkness was a BBC miniseries catching the zeitgeist of the age. The thrusting 1980s had given way to a decade of unease and tension, of fear and mistrust of big corporations and of government, and conspiracy thriller Edge Of Darkness caught that overlying sense of foreboding and menace brilliantly.

Unfortunately, the film never once matches the original for intensity or for that purity of feeling. Instead, everything is not so much dark as just muddy.

A rather craggy-looking Mel Gibson plays Boston cop Thomas Craven who is thrilled when his only daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) comes home from her work in Massachusetts to stay with him. But Emma is viciously gunned down on Craven’s doorstep and though the local police department believe Thomas himself was the target, he is less sure. But who would want to kill Emma and why? Keeping his misgivings to himself, Thomas starts to investigate Emma’s life in secret, which leads him to her shady employer, Jack Bennett (Danny Huston), a mysterious secret agent (Ray Winstone), and a government cover up that could threaten homeland security.

Although the violence within the movie comes in explosive short bursts, it is interspersed by scenes that plod along getting nowhere very fast. Martin Campbell’s direction is pedestrian and staid in the extreme, while the look of the film is so dark it’s as if Boston is wrapped in a perpetual blanket of gloom.

The most unforgivable thing about the movie is the total lack of atmosphere – the viewer never feels that rising sense of dread and tension so prevalent in the original, where you would feel a creeping, unfocused wave of terror slowly overwhelming you.

Without it, this is very dull fare, although Ray Winstone, giving a measured, intelligent performance as the mysterious Darius Jedburgh, manages to totally out-act everyone else on screen.