Edge of Darkness (2010)

Tags

Action, Bojana Novakovic, Damian Young, Danny Huston, Drama, Mel Gibson, Movie, Ray Winstone, Shawn Roberts, Suspense

c'mon pal, can't we just get beyond thunderdome...?

R

Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic, Shawn Roberts, Damian Young

Craven:  You had better decide if you’re hanging on the cross, or banging in the nails.

Thomas Craven (Gibson) is your average movie detective.  He’s single, has a daughter he doesn’t see much of, is generally referred to by his last name only, and he’s really good at fighting and shooting guns.  Unfortunately, his daughter, Emma (Novakovic), is gunned down right in front of Craven, sparking him to launch an investigation into why.

Pretty typical fare here, but probably done a little better than usual.

There’s nothing much new on display, except for maybe the details of the situation that Emma was mixed up in, which still seems to be revealed in a rather formulaic way.  In fact, at times I was wondering why Craven wasn’t putting all the pieces together a little faster.

The best thing about the movie is probably the character of Jedburgh (Winstone).  He’s sort of an ambiguous hit man hired to “clean up” the situation, but instead investigates it first in order to use his own moral code to decide who he kills and who he spares.  At least I think that’s what was going on.  It was late and I was pretty sleepy while watching this, so I could be off in my description there…but he’s still a cool character, whatever his function.

I don’t know if it was the way it was made, the performances, or the story and writing, but something in this movie kept my attention all the way through.  Despite it all seeming so familiar, it had sort of…well…an edge to it.  A seriousness that I appreciated.  All these characters are walking a tightrope between light and darkness…and life and death.  You don’t know who exactly is going to end up on which side by the end of the movie, and that’s what keeps it interesting.

Mel Gibson is alright, but not overly great, in a role it feels like he’s played before (maybe a mix of Payback and Ransom).  His increasingly gravelly voice is especially appropriate for a weary, depressed cop, though at times it sounds almost painful for him to even get an entire sentence out.  It’s really Winstone, Huston, and Young as the possible villains that steal the show.  Huston and Young in particular will crawl right up under your skin with their smarmy attitudes.

Still, despite being well made and holding my attention, this is the kind of movie that I would call highly forgettable.  You might have a good time watching it, but then later you’ll have trouble even remembering the characters and the plot (see 3 paragraphs up).  I think this is mainly due to it being a standard revenge plot, where only the core mystery is what’s different from other films of its type.  Basically you take that basic revenge framework and plug in whatever story you can come up with to provide motivation for the characters.  As long as you can keep thinking up stories, you can just keep churning out revenge flicks.

Frankly, I’m a little tired of them, but as I mentioned, at least this one is well made…

It might not always be a good idea to Get Milk.

10 – 2 for that standard, predictable revenge plot framework – 1.2 because it seemed like Craven should have caught on to a few things a lot sooner than he did = 6.8

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Tags

Action, Danny Huston, Drama, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-choo!

PG-13

Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston

Stryker: The warden tells me that your sentence was carried out by a firing squad at ten hundred hours.  How did that go?
Wolverine: It tickled.

Wolverine (Jackman) and his brother, Victor (Schreiber), fight side by side for many many years, but when they’re recruited to a special forces team that kills innocent people indiscriminately, Wolverine won’t be a part of it and leaves.  Years later, Wolverine is working as a lumberjack and is happily involved with a woman, Kayla (Lynn Collins), but the head of the special forces team, William Stryker (Huston) drags him back into his bizarre experiments with mutants.

I thought the overall story arc of this movie wasn’t that bad, but it lost me in the details.  The characters are dull, there are many scenes lifted straight out of a dozen other similar movies, the dialogue is boring and recycled, and some of the special effects seemed sort of sub-par.  It all added up to one big unmemorable experience.

I kind of liked the relative mystery behind the Wolverine story that we got in the X-Men movies.  It was far more interesting to only get glimpses of his troubled past rather than having it spelled out in a bunch of cliched scenes.  How many times have we seen a heart rate monitor go flat line, everybody look disappointed, then suddenly:  beep.  Wow, he made it!  So the hero of the movie didn’t die in the first half hour…what a surprise.

Is it so hard to be original?  Can’t a writer or director look at a scene and realize that it’s standard, boring dialogue and character development that has been done 1,000 times?  Or is that exactly what the studios want?  They actually want yet another scene of the hero walking away from a crashed vehicle as though he’s going to let the survivors stuck inside live, only to light a trail of gasoline that burns up to the vehicle and causes it to explode in the background as the hero walks triumphantly away?  ‘Cause yeah, that’s been done before.

Anyway, the movie is average.  Things blow up, Wolverine slices up people and objects with his adamantium claws, and we see several other X-People with various far more interesting abilities.  Maybe the next origins movie about one of those characters will be more interesting than this one.

William Stryker does not think through his plans very carefully.  In fact, he seems like kind of an idiot.

10 – 4 for boring, unoriginality – .1 for some blah special effects – .3 for dull characters = 5.6