Edge of Darkness (2010)

Martin Campbell returns to material he first directed for the BBC in 1985, transplanting a British conspiracy serial to Boston and handing the lead to Mel Gibson, who spends the running time looking like a man who has been asked to attend a funeral and a tax audit on the same afternoon. The machinery is sturdy. A homicide detective loses his activist daughter to a shotgun blast meant for him, then works his way up a ladder of corporate and governmental rot. Emma dies in the first reel, which is the oldest structural move in the revenge playbook, and the film never asks her to be anything more than a motive with a Geiger counter attached.

The villain is a weapons contractor called Northmoor, run by a CEO who orders activists killed to conceal illegal nuclear arms deals greased by a compliant senator. This is a proper eat-the-rich engine, and it hums with a faint political charge that never quite rises to sermonizing. The film is angrier about boardroom impunity than about anything else, and it delivers that anger through shotgun barrels and poisoned milk instead of speeches. A weary English fixer, played by Ray Winstone with the air of a man who has read the script and found it wanting, drifts through the middle act discussing philosophy. He is the best thing here.

Culturally, the picture belongs to an earlier dispensation. The cast is white, the gender politics are functional at best, and there is no interest in race, sexuality, climate, or the inner lives of anyone outside the Craven family. It does possess a grimy, competent cynicism about institutions, which now reads as a period piece. The finale, in which the dead reunite in a hospital corridor and walk toward a white light, is either a grace note or a shrug, depending on how much patience remains in the room. A B-movie with an A-movie budget, and it lost money. Some things are simply correct.