Since the explosion of celebrity "news" has radically expanded our collective capacity to follow the lives of professional entertainers in something like real time, the idea of the comeback role has taken on a lot more importance. For instance: remember when everybody was upset at Tom Cruise because he jumped on a couch on the Oprah Winfrey show and then was mean to Matt Lauer? Then he had that funny cameo in Tropic Thunder and everybody laughed and forgave him, because nobody who would put on a fat suit and use hip-hop slang in a movie part could be a humorless, delusional prick in real life. The notion is that as long as an actor can convincingly pull off a role that counters whatever negative image he or she managed to acquire in the course of the preceding scandal, the damage can be minimized or even reversed.
With that in mind, as you might recall, a few years back Mel Gibson was arrested for driving drunk, which wouldn't be that big of a deal had he not used the procedure as an opportunity to sexually harass one of the arresting officers and to expound upon his belief that Jews are responsible for all the world's problems. As his first starring role since this event, Edge of Darkness is Mel Gibson's shot to change the public's perception of him as an unhinged paranoiac. So naturally, he chooses a role where he portrays an revenge-crazed police officer pitted against some sort of high-level conspiracy. My original intention was to do one of my traditional Saturday evening liveblogs while watching Edge of Darkness, which I in fact did for about the first hour of the movie. However, this isn't really one of those films that lends itself to that sort of off-the-cuff analysis, and rather than post something that would be little more than a summary of the onscreen action, I decided it would be better to write a post speculating on what could have possible gone into Mel Gibson's decision to take this role.
Sitting down to the movie with a post-scandal mindset is a fascinating exercise, because once I started down that road, it became pretty much all I could think about. Consider the following (obviously, spoilers for Edge of Darkness ensue, possibly slightly diminishing some future afternoon for you in which it is on cable):
1.) Mel Gibson is constantly in or around cars in this movie. Not only are there several scenes with him driving recklessly or actually causing an auto accident, there's also at least three scenes of him violently accosting people who are in their own cars, and another one where he takes on the driver of a car speeding toward him with his gun and causes a rather spectacular crash. I'd venture to say that Edge of Darkness contains the maximum amount of vehicle-based mayhem possible within the logical confines of the plot. Now, if I were Mel Gibson, which I am clearly not, I'd likely seek to avoid further associating my image with cars or driving for a bit, maybe by picking another one of my famed bloodthirsty period pieces for a return to acting. The fact that he actually appears to have sought out a movie that outright requires him to be doing crazy shit in cars seems telling. Of what, I don't quite know.
2.) This is a conspiracy movie that spends almost no effort in making the conspiracy make any type of sense. The basic outline is that Mel Gibson's daughter is killed at the beginning of the movie, and everyone assumes that the killers were targeting Mel, because he's a cop and missed, even though they were using a shotgun. But actually, Mel Gibson's daughter was the real intended target, because she was interning at a research company with a federal contract that was secretly producing nuclear weapons made to look like they were constructed in foreign countries. She tries to blow the whistle on the company, but no one will listen to her, so she hooks up with some eco-radical group and helps them break into the lab so they can steal the proof, but the company catches the eco-radicals in the act and kills them with 'irradiated steam' which is apparently a thing, and then kills Mel's daughter so she won't talk. There's also some angle with the federal government being in on the plot to kill Mel's daughter, as well as a character played by Ray Winstone, who's some sort of assassin hired by the government to kill Mel Gibson, but he doesn't because he's dying of cancer and he decides he likes Mel Gibson, possibly because of his ability to hold his own in a gruff-off.
So this is a standard "shadowy conspiracy kills everyone" plot, but the thing about it is that Mel Gibson's character never really seems to question anything of the conspiracy tidbits he's given, even when it's outlandish stuff, being told to him by clearly unreliable people. In a more than one case, he straightforwardly accepts information from people who just got done trying to kill him. The consipiracy aspect actually seems to be toned down considerably from the British miniseries that the movie is based on, which according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, diverges into some sort of batshit insane shadow war between man and nature in the final third of the story. However, Mel Gibson's character is still the type that just sort of assumes that of course there's a high level conspiracy at play here, rather than maintaining the sort of skepticism you might expect from a police detective. This is another thing that you would think is sort of at odds with drawing attention away from Mel's image as a paranoid lunatic, and yet, here he is. Did I mention that he's periodically hallucinating about his dead daughter as a young girl throughout the movie, and that there's a scene where he pretends to teach her to shave?
3.) At the climax of the movie, Mel's poisoned or something, and he's staggering around shooting people in a very convincing simulacrum of a drunken rage. Yes, really. There are no words.
The upside to all this is that there aren't any characters that are Jewish or thinly veiled Jewish-like stereotypes (e.g. no scenes of Mel beating up a banker or anything like that), but that aside, my take-away from Edge of Darkness is that Mel Gibson doesn't care that people look at him as an unstable loon. In fact, he might actually get off on it. I guess it makes a certain kind of sense, seeing as he could live comfortable off of royalties for The Passion of the Christ for the rest of his life and never work again. Still, you'd think he might consider toning it down a bit.
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