"Edge of Darkness" Review

Mel Gibson makes his first movie acting appearance in 7 years in the lackluster Edge of Darkness, a wannabe Evil Government Conspiracy thriller that initially looks like a Man on Fire unstoppable vengeance flick, but meanders from banality to incomprehensible confusion.

After his daughter is shotgunned to death right next to him, Gibson's Boston police detective initially assumes that he was the target, but the deeper he digs, the more he finds that she may've been radiation-poisoned by her shady government contractor employer. A muttering Ray Winstone is also lurking around the fringes as some sort of fixer/hitman who may be there to help or hinder Gibson. Danny Huston plays the Evil Corporate Guy behind it all.

Gibson is photographed to look like hell - all lines and wrinkles - and he's good as the grieving dad on a mission, but he's done this before even better in the far better Ransom. Some of the supporting actors are gratingly one-note, especially the girl playing his daughter's friend with a hysterical (as in freaking out) Bawstan accent. But Edge of Darkness (lousy title) really falters in its last act as Gibson somehow gets afflicted as his daughter was; did he do this to himself deliberately or what?

Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable if nothing else is on.

ADDENDUM: It totally slipped my mind, but one real howler of a detail was that an Evil U.S. Senator involved in the conspiracy is a Republican. (Why not make him Martian?) Remember, this is set in Massachusetts. Until the election of Scott Brown two months ago, there hadn't been a GOP Senator since the Mesozoic era. How the filmmakers thought they could slip that past the audience indicates they either had fairly low presumptions of the herd's intelligence or were more interested in the cheap political shot. So lame.