Welcome back, Mel Gibson! Sort of. Kind of. Edge of Darkness will not be enough to convince any rabid anti-Gibsonites to shift their allegiances, but it should be enough to bring some stragglers back to the fold. Eight years ago was the last time Gibson prowled the screen with his charismatic grin and twinkling, tortured eyes. No wonder he had been written off as a conservative Catholic crackpot who lost it somewhere around The Passion’s two-hundred-million-dollar mark.

Now Gibson approaches the Edge of Darkness as Boston detective Thomas Craven. A widower, Craven dotes on his grown-up little girl, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), an MIT grad working as a trainee for a giant Massachusetts R&D firm, Northmoor. When Emma visits dear old dad and is gunned down in a supposed hit on the detective, Craven turns his professional skills on her personal life, of which he knows strangely little. The more Craven investigates Emma’s life, the more he begins to believe she was killed because of something she had discovered about Northmoor and her boss, Jack Bennett (Danny Huston).

Craven the detective teams up with Craven the grieving dad to investigate Bennett and uncovers a run-of-the-mill political thriller cover-up. An incomprehensible fixer, Jedburgh (Ray Winstone), befriends (i.e., does not kill) Craven for wholly expected reasons of his own that are revealed late in the film. A pair of dark-suited federal spooks (Denis O’Hare and David Aaron Baker) and a presciently Republican Massachusetts senator (Damian Young), trapped in Bennett’s conspiratorial web, wind up in Craven’s vengeful crosshairs. In a widow’s peak-off between this crew of receding-haired men, Huston’s Bennett may win a close match over Gibson’s Craven, but even the least imaginative audience member should have no trouble predicting the film’s satisfying, if telegraphed climax.

With its violent, bloody script co-written by Oscar winner William Monahan, Edge of Darkness strains to point out its familial connections to The Departed. But director Martin Campbell, the proficient wrangler of Bond adventures (Goldeneye, Casino Royale) who also helmed the 1985 BBC miniseries upon which this new film is based, is a craftsman where Martin Scorsese is an artist, a difference made quite apparent by Edge of Darkness. Fans of the TV serial are crying foul, of course, extolling the virtues of their beloved original. Granted, I expect it could not have been worse, though star Bob Peck is no Gibson. At least Gibson’s Craven does not kiss his daughter’s vibrator, like his predecessor did in writer Troy Kennedy-Martin’s six-episode BAFTA TV award winner. Howard Shore’s score punctuates scenes with hollow Hollywood melodramatic stingers (too bad they could not get original composers Eric Clapton and the late Michael Kamen to contribute something Lethal Weapon-ish), and outside of the major players, the supporting cast is distinctly, deservedly unfamiliar. Most are not bad, but they are certainly not memorable either.

The unimpressive bit players matter little. This movie might as well be a pilot for “The Mel Gibson Show,” where each week he plots payback on the baddies who killed his family. Older and grayer than last we looked, Mad Mel still gives good vengeful hero. Craven traces his unforgiving heritage back to William Wallace and “Mad” Max Rockatansky (and Hamlet and whatever his fake Francis “The Swamp Fox” Marion was called in The Patriot), and the baddies best not forget it. The man did not suddenly forget how to express his grief through good old-fashioned bad-guy pounding, and he still knows how to turn his crazy eyes on and off like they were wired to an external switch.

Considering how the mysterious colors are added in a predictable paint-by-numbers fashion, what I found most fascinating, after Gibson’s fine return to acting form, was how politically antithetical Edge of Darkness seems to a cursory understanding of the Passion filmmaker’s worldview. One would expect a fascistic “24”-fueled revenge fantasy rather than a middle-to-left conspiracy theory about the cahoots in which a private defense contractor and the government are discovered by a whistleblower and a leftist environmentalist organization. If you expected Mad Mel and Jack Bauer to be best buds, you would be sorely mistaken, according to Edge of Darkness.

Viewers' feelings about Edge of Darkness will certainly be colored by their opinions of Gibson. Those still holding a grudge from The Passion and his well-publicized, vitriolic arrest will not find anything of interest here. I was ready to forgive and forget with Apocalypto, but despite its ultraviolence, it was too boring to completely convince me. Plus, I think I needed to see Gibson face-to-screen again to truly bury the hatchet. Again, welcome back, Mel. Please do not take so long between visits next time. And while I am making pie-in-the-sky requests, how about something a little more humorous? I would even accept Lethal Weapon V, so long as Joe Pesci and Chris Rock do not come back.

Drew Wheeler