Mel is mad to the max

An aging lethal weapon: Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness

A QUARTER of a century after he directed Edge of Darkness, that deliciously barmy conspiracy series for the BBC, Martin Campbell has been given the chance to helm the big screen version. That's what happens when you deliver a film as huge as Casino Royale.

Overly faithful movie adaptations have become one of the new century’s scourges, so we should not complain that the writers have hacked away at the late Troy Kennedy Martin’s script. It is, however, worth pondering how little of the original flavour remains.

The opening hook remains as before. A middle-aged police officer named Craven (Mel Gibson, in his first lead role in eight years) watches hopelessly as an unknown assailant guns down his daughter. Initially, Craven assumes the shotgun shell was intended for his own chest, but, after poking around in his daughter’s affairs, he discovers that she was investigating crooked goings-on at a sinister nuclear facility.

That synopsis continues to resemble a précis of episode one from the series. But the surrounding noise could not be more different. Nuclear power, once a totemic evil for the left, now seems that bit less ominous than it did in 1985. Moving the action across the Atlantic no longer allows musings on US infiltration of European affairs.

The TV drama’s grand – indeed, gloriously overheated – ecological mythologies have been replaced by nods towards contemporary outrages by security firms such as Blackwater.

The end result is a decent, if unremarkable, addition to the surprisingly busy genre of films in which Mel Gibson extracts revenge – usually for the death of a loved one – by ramming spears into groins and discharging bullets into faces. Now impressively craggy, Mel, despite that lay-off, still proves well able to carry a film, and Danny Huston confirms that he’s becoming the patrician villain of his era.

It is, however, a shame the conspiracy drips out in a series of minor revelations that – though cumulatively worrying – never exactly set the blood racing. Come to think of it, that’s the sort of plot structure that belongs in a TV series.