Gloomy 'Darkness,' Inane 'Rome,' Lunatic 'Legion,' Moving 'Shots'
FS
Issue date: 2/2/10 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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Mel Gibson returns to the screen in front of the camera for the first time in nine years, but it's not a remarkable homecoming.
In "Edge of Darkness" (wide release), he plays the sort of avenging angel role he's famous for. He's Tom Craven, a Boston police detective whose daughter no sooner comes home for a visit from her job as a nuclear engineer than she falls desperately ill and then is shot to death outside his house.
The rest of the grim, downbeat film trails Craven as he tracks down his daughter's killers. The investigation leads him to the gigantic firm where she worked, a boyfriend who's frightened for his own life and a senator with some unsavory contacts - including a gang of goons and a slick British fixer adept at making problems, and people, disappear.
The picture wants to be a crackerjack political thriller filled with skullduggery and surprises, but though it boasts a virtual army of suspicious characters and gruesome murders, the revelations turn out to be pretty much what you've expected from the start. There's a dated feel to the whole thing, perhaps because it's actually based on a British mini-series from 1985 - a time to which the concluding flourish about the press as the guardian of uncomfortable truth seems more suited than the present. And if considered in retrospect, the story is a cheat, since it's based on an event at the very beginning that we're later shown made no sense whatever.
As for Gibson, he's as intense as ever. But in this case, his energy is in the service of a script that feels past its freshness date.
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"When in Rome"
Hollywood romantic comedies don't get much sillier or limp than "When in Rome" (wide release), in which another of those hard-driving but loveless American women, this time played by Kristen Bell, finds romance.
But this time the road to happiness is paved with magical obstacles. By stealing coins from a Roman fountain, the girl supposedly invokes a spell that causes the five guys who tossed them there to fall madly in love with her. And one of them is the fellow she's actually attracted to - so is his interest in her real, or just the result of the spell?
It's just possible that with clever writing and slick direction, this loony premise could have been turned into a moderately amusing fantasy. But the script is awful - the suitors are a particularly grating lot - and the set-pieces, like a sequence in one of those restaurants where one eats in total darkness, would have been rejected as sketches on "Saturday Night Live."
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