You know from the first couple of seconds into this trailer that something very nasty is about to happen to Mel Gibson – or rather, his daughter. Big mistake. We all know what happens when Mel gets his mad on. Trouble in River City – not to mention a few racial slurs, followed by artfully written public apologies.
This time out, Gibson has some weighty support from the great Ray Winstone. I’m a huge fan of Winstone’s, but I’m afraid his lines should have been subtitled here, if the trailer is any indication. His mouth is fully loaded with East End marbles.
From what I’ve read, Robert De Niro was originally slated for Winstone’s role. Perhaps De Niro didn’t relish the prospect of being upstaged by a scenery-chewing Gibson.
The film is actually a remake of a six-hour BBC mini-series broadcast in 1985. In the TV version, the Winstone role was played by Joe Don Baker. I’ve read the original teleplay, and, as I recall, the Winstone/De Niro/Baker character scores nine out of ten on the buffoon scale. Perhaps I was just imagining Don Baker in the role. Certainly Winstone’s take on the character is in a different realm altogether.
Danny Huston (son of John, brother of Angelica) also has a significant role in the film, apparently as the number one heavy. Huston has appeared with Winstone once previously, in the Aussie alt-western, “The Propostion,” a great vehicle for both actors.
The original “Edge of Darkness” was as much a political drama as a crime thriller. It was conceived as a statement against the Thatcher administration and its policy of secrecy vis a vis the nuclear industry.
Interviewed for the documentary “Magnox: The Secrets Of Edge Of Darkness,” Kennedy Martin said of the genesis of the project, “We had the Cold War. The Falklands. The Nuclear State. The prospect of a miners’ strike. Greenham Common. It was Thatcher’s Britain. At the BBC, there was no political dimension in their popular drama whatsoever. And I was really depressed about it, as indeed were other writers that I knew. And so, I said to my closest colleagues: ‘The only thing one can do is actually write stuff that one knows is not going to get made, but at least we’ll get it out of our system.’ And that’s how I started to write Edge Of Darkness. I didn’t really think that it stood much of a chance of being produced.”
Kennedy Martin also scripted the original “The Italian Job,” a Michael Caine vehicle, and with Walter Hill co-scripted “Red Heat,” a 1988 feature starring the current Governor of California (Herr Schwarzenegger), and James Belushi.
In writing “Edge of Darkness,” Kennedy Martin was much influenced by Gaia Theory, as conceived by environmentalist James Lovelock. In brief, the theory postulates that the Earth is a complex network of interconnected systems that, taken together, form a unified, homeostatic organism. Lovelock first developed the theory while working for NASA in the 1960′s, and the Gaia (Greek goddess personifying Earth) nomenclature was suggested by novelist William Golding.
The original teleplay had a more mystical aspect than the broadcast version. Kennedy Martin envisioned the protagonist as a latter day Green Man, and in the final sequence, the hero turns into a tree. This version was vetoed by lead actor Bob Peck, however, who apparently said, “I’m not turning into a f***ing tree!”
Somehow, I suspect that if that ending had found its way into the remake script, it would have generated a similar response from Mel Gibson.
