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80An intense Mel Gibson performance anchors this brutally effective crime thriller.
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75Campbell’s film offers not surprises, exactly, but craftsmanship and low, brute, cunning satisfactions.
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75Perhaps the best compliment I can pay to his work in Edge of Darkness is that I wouldn't particularly want to see this movie with grumpy Harrison Ford starring instead. Welcome back, Mel.
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75I don't see Edge of Darkness as a great movie, or a particularly exalted one, but I do see it as one made by people who know where the buttons are - and who know how to press them. Hard.
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75Though the experience is nerve-racking and cathartic under Campbell's skilled direction, musings on family and grief and Gibson's intense, but subtle, performance stay with us longest.
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75His (Gibson) slow-burn fury keeps the movie going, but not enough to invest us in any justice beyond payback.
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70Both the film and television project were directed by Martin Campbell. He creates a nice level of tension throughout, and there are a couple of legitimate shocks (including one jaw-dropper).
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70Edge of Darkness is somewhat stylish, and it's intelligently made.
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70A meathead revenge picture, but it’s very satisfying. Director Martin Campbell, coming off "Casino Royale," has a style that’s blunt and bruising.
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Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, Gibson can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.
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70An efficient, politically inert fantasy.
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63Gibson's acting has deepened. Too bad his comeback vehicle springs so many leaks.
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63Winstone's interaction with Gibson provides the movie with much of its interest. For the rest, it's a skillful exercise in CGI and standard-order thriller supplies.
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63Strange and gloomy.
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63The movie’s weaknesses include the overuse of grainy flashbacks of Craven’s daughter as a child, and the conversations he has with her after she is gone. Both are tremendously moving ideas but eventually succumb to bathos from repetition.
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63Apart from feeling misled by the trailers, it's a decent, middle-of-the-road adult thriller that competently goes through the paces.
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63Director Martin Campbell does a nice job of creating suspense, and Ray Winstone stands out for his performance as a conflicted hitman.
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60In Hollywood, all is forgiven if you can deliver the goods. On-screen, at least, there’s little difference between this Gibson and the one we remember from earlier films like “Ransom” and “Payback.”
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60An uneven, somewhat meandering thriller is given emotional pull by Mel Gibson’s excellent comeback performance. The lethal weapon hasn’t lost it.
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60There’s no room for such soul-searching uncertainty with Gibson. After a few rapidly ticked-off minutes of gloom, the mission is clear: Get the sons of bitches, and make ’em pay.
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60They’ve shed all of the Brit-centric political aspects and updated it to make a riveting, pulse-pounding suspense thriller that really does keep you on ‘edge.’
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60Campbell's topnotch production team yields predictably polished results, but the director's decision to revisit the late Troy Kennedy Martin's teleplay, finally, feels lacking.
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50The movie isn't exactly full of twists and turns, but neither is it a long, hard slog.
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50Considering the talent involved and the strength of the source material, there's no way Edge of Darkness should have been this disappointing. Part of the problem is a direct result of condensation - there's no way to cram six hours of the dense mini-series upon which the movie is based into about 110 minutes without paying a penalty.
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50The larger shell game here is that Edge of Darkness is offered as a political thriller, but with real-world politics removed. What we’re left with is a familiar mechanism for delivering a vicarious, violent, wish-fulfilment fantasy, with Mel in a familiar position, in the driver’s seat, pedal to the metal.
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50An odd duck of a thriller. Quiet, talkative, with the occasional explosion of violence, it has ghosts and characters philosophizing, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald or blurting insensitive non-sequiturs.
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50Feels like a movie that wants to bare its fangs, but only manages a mild gumming.
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50Edge of Darkness is reasonably well executed, but its competence reeks of fatigue. Another dead kid. Another angry dad. Another day at the office.
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Martin Campbell directed, displaying none of the flair that made his “Casino Royale” such a hoot.
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50Quickly devolves into another showcase for Gibson’s snorting-bull act, a routine he could happily have shelved during his time off.
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40Edge of Darkness has the look and feel of a Brit film shot in America – it's all dark, boxy rooms with powerful white men in impeccable black suits discussing how to tidy up the minor mishaps of their game over brandy and cigars.
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38Here most of the punishment is inflicted on the audience, which gets nailed to a cross of boredom.
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30Edge of Darkness was one of the most enthralling, intricate and genuinely thrilling productions in the history of the small screen. The big-screen version--directed by Martin Campbell, who did the original--offers an example of why the studios' numbers often add up, and why, at the same time, so many of today's Hollywood movies leave us cool if not downright cold.
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25A thriller boasting Mel Gibson's first starring role in eight years, elicits a gigantic wow -- as in ``Wow, does this movie suck!''
User score distribution:
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Positive: 38 out of 47
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Mixed: 5 out of 47
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Negative: 4 out of 47
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6Although the plot is pretty laughable, the movie does feature a pretty mesmerizing Mel Gibson performance in the center role.