Edge of Darkness

While Campbell and screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell have transplanted the action from Yorkshire to Boston, Massachusetts, they have at least stuck to the basic outlines of Troy Kennedy Martin's original. When his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is killed by a shotgun blast on the doorstep of his home, grief-stricken police detective Thomas Craven (a world-weary Mel Gibson) is naturally determined to track down her killer. Early assumptions that Craven himself was the hitman's intended target crumble as he unearths evidence that Emma was involved with an environmental group trying to expose a conspiracy involving illicit nuclear weapons at the Northmoor defence plant, where she was a low-level employee. Shadowy hitmen and intelligence figures start coming out of the woodwork to make sure Craven's discoveries never see the light of day. Craven goes into lone-wolf mode and makes it his mission to find answers and avenge his daughter.

The snag is, where the original Edge... brilliantly captured a mood of fear and dread about the nuclear industry, intensified by the authoritarian mood of the Thatcher-Reagan years, the course of events over the last 25 years mean that we've become woefully inured to the routine scale of corporate and governmental lies and deception (there's a televised inquiry currently in progress along these very lines). Indeed, the somewhat cursory manner in which the movie introduces us to a bent lawyer, a corrupt Senator and a murderous business executive, not to mention a far-from-upstanding Boston police officer, impart the dispiriting sense that the film-makers are suppressing a yawn and going through the motions. It's hardly surprising when, after two hours, you find you've just sat through a creakingly average conspiracy thriller, lacking a single character you could really care tuppence about. Not even Ray Winstone (pictured below) can kick much life into the vaguely-defined security fixer Darius Jedburgh.

The Kennedy Martin original was also distinctive in articulating a resounding ecological warning, setting up a confrontation between mankind's malign, misguided tinkering and the mythic power of Mother Nature. Hence he called his eco-activist group GAIA, referring to a hypothesis in which earth is its own living biosystem. In the movie the activists belong to something called Night Flower, and references to any kind of spiritual dimension have been reduced to Craven's imaginary conversations with his dead daughter.

You'd have to conclude that Campbell and his writers have missed a major trick here. James Cameron's Avatar may be simplistic, but vital to its huge success is surely its timely connection to issues of ecological awareness and protecting the environment. This might have been a major weapon in the Edge of Darkness locker too, but it makes no attempt to reach for anything beyond the literal surface of the action. The story's emotional force supposedly derives from a lonely man trying to deal with the aftermath of his much-loved daughter's murder, but Edge-the-movie settles instead into a routine shoot-'em-up where stone-faced Mel metes out comeuppance to the scumbags. While he's committed to avenging Emma's death, he shows no glimmer of comprehension of the issues that she  considered important enough to risk her life for. As remakes go, file this alongside The Italian Job and Get Carter.