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Mel Gibson may be getting up there in years, but to anyone who doubts his 54-year-old body can handle the rigors of headlining a thriller like Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness, Gibson says:
I can still kick ass.
It's been eight years since Gibson starred in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs — years he spent producing, directing, and dealing with the fallout of his infamous Malibu rant. But, despite the mileage, Gibson says that he can still compete with younger actors, even offering up advice to other aging movie stars.
You can still do the rough house. You just have to book up the chiropractor in advance. Do it in advance — that would be my only advice. Works for me every time, sorts me out.
It's good advice, but Gibson's message comes a tad late to help out fellow '80s-action-movie alum Sylvester Stallone. Stallone recently admitted that he broke his neck while shooting a fight scene for his new movie, The Expendables.
In Edge of Darkness, Gibson plays a veteran detective in search of the truth behind the murder of his daughter (played by Bojana Novakovic), a revenge-fueled quest that reveals his daughter's dark secrets and the cover-ups that led to her death. Early reviews of the film are all across the board, with aggregate review site RottenTomatoes giving Edge of Darkness an average rating of 58%.
Posted 01.29.10 by BrentJS -
It's been eight years since Mel Gibson has played a lead role, and it looks like he's aged about twice that much since starring in 2002's Signs. Was it worth the wait? So far, this is a highly polarizing pic.
"An intense Mel Gibson performance anchors this brutally effective crime thriller."
— Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter
"Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, he [Gibson] can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut."
— Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice
"In terms of consistent visceral thrills, Taken this isn't — despite [director] Campbell's demonstrable flair for shooting action."
— Brian Lowry, Variety
"...a tonally stilted procedural with an inappropriately impassive air, given the hero's quest to avenge a beloved daughter shotgunned to pieces in his presence."
— Ryan Stewart, Slant Magazine
"For obvious reasons ... Mel Gibson desperately needs a good movie. His fans need to see him in one. I am sorry to report that Edge of Darkness is not it."
— Rex Reed, New York Observer
Posted 01.27.10 by reelz -
Not many directors get to make a TV mini-series and then create a movie based on the same material 25 years later, but that's exactly what Martin Campbell has done with Edge of Darkness. The director spoke with ComingSoon about why he returned to the story so many years later.
What happened was that someone suggested making it into a movie way back in 2000, and I was kind of lukewarm about it. I thought, "Oh, well ... maybe they can get some money to develop the thing," and over the next five or six years, a writer called Andrew Bovell, a very good writer from Australia, sort of whittled it down from six hours to where it is now, a two-hour movie. I was doing other projects, Casino" [Royale] amongst them, and this was being developed as it were behind me, and then at about the sixth draft, it was shaping up pretty well, and I read it, and I had just met Graham King and had suggested it to him, and he said, "Look, I'll finance it, because I love the series," so he did. I sent it to Mel [Gibson], and Mel was kind of interested. We then got Bill Monahan to do the final two drafts of the movie, and Mel was on board, so it all came together basically.
Campbell admits he treated Edge of Darkness as a "completely separate" movie from the TV series, though besides moving from England to Boston and losing some of the political backstory of "Thatcher's England," Campbell says the two iterations of the story are still similar.
Clearly you have to lose a lot of stuff when you reduce six hours down. Thecharacters that remain are the leads, which is Jedburgh (Ray Winstone) and Craven (Gibson), and all the emotional stakes in the movie are identical to the series, i.e. a police detective whose daughter is murdered and he sets out todiscover who was responsible. The kind of emotional spine of the story is identical to the series.
Gibson's role of Detective Thomas Craven is his first since 2002's Signs, having been busying himself by directing movies like Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. Campbell says Gibson approached the process simply as an actor.
He simply said at the beginning of the movie: "Look, I'm just an actor. I'm not a director, I'm not a producer, I'm none of that. I simply want to act in this and that's what we're doing." He made it very clear up front that that's what his role was.
Posted 01.25.10 by Ryan -
When Martin Campbell completes his work on Green Lantern, the movie could be the start of the director's third franchise, having directed two Zorro movies and two James Bond movies (Casino Royale and Goldeneye). Campbell told Crave Online that Green Lantern has franchise potential, considering the movie will be an origin story.
Well, first of all, it's the origin story so I think people, certainly Green Lantern fans, know what that's about. It's Hal Jordan. As you know, there's probably been five Green Lanterns. So it pretty much sticks to the origin story. It sets up Oa, the planet where the Green Lantern calls his base. It sets up Hal's training on Oa and becoming a Green Lantern. Fear clearly is the enemy. So it's got all of those.
Having reinvented James Bond twice, Campbell knows how to set up a character in a way that creates future movies. For Campbell, again, it's all about an origin story.
Casino Royale
of course was an opportunity to go back to the tone of the books which they never were in the original movies. They never have been. Even the [Sean] Connery movies are not in the same tone as the book. Again, I was lucky enough to have an origin story. Bond really doesn't become Bond until the last frame of the movie. He's a f***ed up guy. He's a guy who smokes too much. He doesn't smoke in the movie but in the books he certainly smokes too much, he drinks too much, he abhors a certain kind of violence when it's very messy and ugly. It's something he hates. He finally shoots someone in the forehead with a bullet, but the bathroom scene is very distasteful and ugly and clumsy and messy. So there are elements to Bond, and of course a great relationship with the girl which allowed you the one meaningful relationship in his life apart from On Her Majesty's Secret Service where he marries the girl. So that was a really great opportunity to get into the tone of the books and make him a much darker, more f***edup character which was way more interesting in my opinion.
Campbell's latest movie, Edge of Darkness, is not a franchise starting movie, per se, but it is something that Campbell has visited before in the form of a BBC mini-series of the same name that he directed in 1985. Campbell says the thriller is punctuated by "tough guy talk" but it's pace will be dictated by the emotions that Mel Gibson's character faces as he investigates the murder of his daughter.
The truth is the pace is, look: If you compare this to, say, Taken, which in the first four and a half minutes of the movie dispenses with all its emotional story. The rest of it is Liam Neeson with a gun dealing with these bad guys in Paris, shoots about 200 of them which is a terrific film, by the way. Whereas this is a slower burn, it's about loss, it's about grief, it's about a detective discovering things about his daughter he had no idea she was involved in. So there are other elements to it andan emotional core throughout the movie I hope.
Edge of Darkness opens January 29, while Green Lantern opens June 17, 2011.
Posted 01.21.10 by Ryan -
Martin Campbell is hard at work preparing for Green Lantern now that his latest movie, Edge of Darkness, is ready to hit theaters this month. The movie, based on a 1985 BBC mini-series that Campbell directed, is Mel Gibson's first leading role since 2002's Signs. Gibson plays a homicide detective who starts investigating the death of his daughter and uncovers a conspiracy of corporate and government collusion.
Warner Brothers has released 7 clips to help promote the movie, which Collider has compiled together into one long clip for your viewing convenience. Check them out below:
Posted 01.19.10 by Ryan -
Director Martin Campbell's (Casino Royale) latest film, Edge of Darkness, marks the return of Mel Gibson as a leading man, his first such performance since M. Night Shyamalan's Signs in 2002.
Based on Campbell's BBC mini-series of the same name, Darkness tells the story of veteran policeman Thomas Craven (Gibson), who obsessively investigates the shooting death of his daughter on their front steps. In the process, he uncovers far more than he bargained for.
Edge of Darkness was written for the screen by Academy Award-winner William Monahan (The Departed) and also stars Ray Winstone and Danny Huston.
Posted 10.16.09 by BrentJS