Tom Craven (Mel Gibson) loses his daughter to a violent death in the opening segments of Edge of Darkness, and spends the rest of the movie working out his penance as a father unable to protect his child. It's classic Gibson: a film set in the gritty world of reality that has spiritual overtones and underlying agendas to test viewers and force them to consider more deeply their own choices and beliefs. I saw the feature in the theater but found myself drawn back into the torment of a father unable to protect his progeny, betrayed by the justice system which he served and trusted, and isolated by the sense of purpose which becomes his alone to carry.

Whether you've seen the trailer or not, there are two scenes which steal your breath away, and again, reflect the scenes of violence in a movie like Mystic River or the shocking behavior in a story like Crash. The first is most definitely the murder/assassination of Craven's daughter, as a simple homecoming turns into a two-way death blow. No matter how many times you see it, there's a suddenness, a finality, to the shooting, and the gender-turned pieta that results is one that you can be certain Gibson had a hand in. His love of the original BBC show notwithstanding, one has to assume his Catholicism played a part in that depiction!

The second is the murder of an informant on the roadway. It happened so fast that in the theater I could hardly hear myself breathe but my heart almost exploded out of my chest. I rewound the scene to watch it a third time on DVD, and it was still just as sudden. It's wonderful (if not very, very disturbing) cinematography that startles and disturbs. The following moments are equally telling as a Mel Gibson movie has a certain amount of "lone ranger western" flick and this one has its moments, including the ending.

Having done a little research, it seems that Gibson's next flick will be about a toy company CEO who wears a beaver hand puppet. That's not exactly what I expect from him; Edge of Darkness is more like it. There's a violence I expect from him, and can almost appreciate, and here, all of those expectations are fulfilled. I've compared the movie to Death Sentence and Taken, and found it to be more like the latter. Where Death Sentence seems sickly perverse, as Kevin Bacon takes great pleasure in taking vengeance, Taken is solely focused on the retribution that Liam Neeson's father figure must take to free his daughter. It's not gratuitous; it's justice. And that's where I come down on Edge of Darkness.

There's a great cost in serving as the avenging angel, or the angel of death. If nothing else, it eats at your soul, and drags you closer to the proverbial edge of darkness. But this one proves that a steadfast heart must sometimes be plunged into the dark to drag the truth out into the light.