For his first on screen appearance since his drunken anti-Semitic tirade put him in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, what tarnished star Mel Gibson really needed was a big barn burner of a performance, the sort of scorcher that would burn away all of the lingering bad memories. Directed by the guy behind Casino Royale, and written and produced by the team behind The Departed, Edge of Darkness could have been it. Sadly it is not. Gibson's got a pleasing slow burn thing going on here but other than the bursts of extreme violence the film is a weirdly muted affair hobbled by a string of ill-advised side trips into a sort of mawkish sentimentality.

Gibson is Thomas Craven, a veteran Boston detective -- yes, he does the entire film in a Boston accent -- happy to welcome his twenty-something daughter Emma home.  Happy, that is, until she is killed in a drive-by shooting that the local police believe was intended for Thomas himself. If, however, you actually believe that Thomas was the intended victim for longer than two minutes then you are the dumbest person in the room, kept company in your stupidity by the entire Boston police force who can't see what's glaringly obvious and what Thomas recognizes almost immediately.  Emma got shot because Emma was the one who drive-by man meant to shoot.

What could be happening here? A young nuclear technician working for a classified military contractor comes home on short notice, shivering and vomiting before being blasted in the chest with a shotgun on the steps of her family home? Can you say cover up? Thomas certainly can, which means it's time to stop being cop-Thomas, start being angry-dad-Thomas, dig to the bottom of things and exact revenge.

The core plot here is solid and, deep inside, it really feels as though Edge of Darkness really, really wants to be a hard boiled revenge noir. It's a genre Gibson is fantastically well-suited for at this stage of his career, and one that the film often flirts with with fantastic success. When the film pushes through the edge and into full on darkness is when it is at its best, Gibson a bitter, angry, uncaring angel of death. These are the bits of the film that Ray Winstone populates as a government security specialist/philosophical hitman. These are the bits that feature sudden bursts of gunfire and graphic violence that can jolt you out of the seat in the way Takeshi Kitano used to do in the days when he made the best damn yakuza mobster films on the planet. Trust me on this, if you haven't seen Sonatine and Fireworks, you need to. I honestly think that this dark noir film is what they set out to make here and I also honestly think that somewhere down the line that film got focus-grouped away in a bid to throw Gibson's female fan base a bone.

So, for the ladies, we get Gibson the sensitive and loving father. Never mind that he is so disconnected from his daughter that he doesn't know the first thing about what she does for a living, has no awareness at all of any of her friends or personal relationships and is angrily accused by her grieving boyfriend of never once coming to visit her - a claim he doesn't even try to refute. No, despite all of this, she was still "his girl" and his reason for living and so along side of Thomas the avenging angel we also get Thomas the weepy-feely man, seeing visions of his little girl as she was in childhood, hearing voices and having conversations with an invisible dead person. The visions are actually a fairly effective touch and one that works within the other limits of his character -- i.e., he sees his daughter as she was when he actually did have a decent relationship with her, thus underlining the distance that grew in her adult life -- but the voices and conversations? Sweet lord, those are bad, drippily sentimental scenes that don't belong in this movie or any other.

Edge of Darkness isn't going to put Mel back on the A-list.  It's too inconsistent, too sloppy in its execution. But it's about two-thirds of a great movie and those two-thirds are at least enough to remind why Gibson became a huge star in the first place and show that some of that old fire is still in there. Can he rehabilitate his image enough to regain his former stature? I kind of doubt it. But this at least gives him something that he can work with and build on moving forward.