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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!''
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 35 out of 44
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Mixed: 5 out of 44
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Negative: 4 out of 44
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