Edge of Darkness

Oh, Mel Gibson... You've had an interesting road over the last couple of years. You created one of the highest grossing independent films of all time in The Passion of the Christ, then pissed everyone off and lost all of your cred when you freaked out on some Malibu police officers and shot off a bunch of racial slurs about Jews. Now your back, and, apparently, we're supposed to care. I gotta be honest with you, a much better come back would have been some kind of totally BA Mad Max sequel where he's like old and crazy and goes and kills a whole bunch of people and wins all the gasoline in the future. Basically the same plot as all of the other Mad Max films. Hey, stick with what you know.

Edge of Darkness is a remake of an older BBC drama of the same name. In this Americanized version, Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a Boston city police officer who, upon picking up his daughter for a weekend visit, is attacked in his own home, and his daughter is murdered. The murderer yelled out "Craven" before putting two shotgun shells into his daughter and running. Craven vows to find the killer, and why he was being targeted. As he follows the evidence, though, he realizes that the attacker wasn't after him at all, but after his daughter, because she stood to blow the lid off a massive secret at her employer.

Edge of Darkness had a couple of cool moments, but they were overshadowed by the rather glacial pace of the semi-procedural movie. When you watch a Gibson movie, you want to see people get killed and things blow up, and there was just too much of a lack of those things. Also, Gibson's acting was over the top in a lot of places, and some of the stuff that happened in the movie seemed WAY to cliche. All in all, Edge of Darkness is definitely a wait for DVD, or whenever it's on cable.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I'm not going to bother doing the traditional review tactic of giving you some kind of hint at what this film is about. I'm really not sure what I could say that would do it justice and still not give away the plot. The plot, in fact, is so strangely insane that I don't really feel like I can discuss it at all without giving it away.

I can say this, though - the film had me for the first half. It felt like I was a kid again, sitting in a darkened theater and watching Last Crusade (which I like, by the way. I say that because most people don't). When the second half came around, though... They lost me. Real quick. It turned into cartoonish spectacle and just seemed kind of stupid, which, I don't understand, because they managed to keep away from all of that in the first three films. Why did they feel the need to go into it here? It just doesn't make any sense.

Things I did like about it - 

1. I liked that it was post-war, and they just said "Listen, we know Harrison Ford is twenty years older, so we'll make the film take place twenty some odd years after the last one". It made me happy that they didn't bother with trying to pick up where they left off.

2. I LOVED the whole atomic bomb/ground zero recreation they did. I just love the imagery of the fake town, with all of the fake people (which, I thought, was used very well in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes).

3. I thought it was kind of cool that they brought Marion back.

4. Two words - Cate Blanchett. Not so much her character, but just her. She rocks. They could have a scene of her playing with a paddle ball for ten minutes, and I would come out proclaiming the film as cinematic gold.

Things I was on the fence about - 

1. They reference Indy's dad dying. Umm... maybe it's just me, and I hate to get technical here, but didn't he drink out of the cup of everlasting life in Last Crusade? I mean, Indy did to... So, shouldn't the dad still be alive?

2. Shia LeBouf is always pretty decent as an actor, but the whole Marlon Brando reference was SO obvious... 

Things I didn't like about it - 

1. Well, most of what I don't like I can't really talk about without giving away plot points.

2. It was really obvious that Lucas had his hand in this a little too much. I'm pretty sure Lucas has completely lost it. He's let his world collapse in on itself, remaking or "re-imagining" all of his past success's. Hey George, how about giving me a little chunk of your billion dollar + fortune, and let me make some GOOD movies, and you just slink away. Or give us that Tuskegee Airmen film you've been going on about for, like, a decade now! Please! Just something OTHER THAN Star Wars.

3. The opening sequence. What was the point? What were those kids doing so far out in the middle of nowhere in Nevada anyway? ... I'm just saying...

All in all, I wasn't completely let down, but, it could have been a lot better.