Country: US/GB
Technical: col/2.35:1 117m
Director: Martin Campbell
Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone
Synopsis:
A police detective begins to suspect that his daugher's assailants were emissaries of her employer, a nuclear development facility encoding weapons for covert use.
Review:
Campbell revisits his 1985 BBC thriller for the American market. With a grim-faced Mel Gibson meting out justice to evil-doers, it works pretty well along the lines of a conspiracy thriller, but he is also a weakness: as a cop with a 30 year-old clean record he has more or less carte blanche to apply his particular 'set of skills', making him less an ordinary Joe all at sea, which has a knock-on effect for the Craven-Jedburgh (Winstone) relationship because they are too similar. The producers try to compensate with some sentimental funk involving the daughter's ghost talking to him from the afterlife, which doesn't work anyway (he is still Mad Mel) and certainly not the apotheosis finale.
Country: US/GB
Technical: col/2.35:1 117m
Director: Martin Campbell
Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone
Synopsis:
A police detective begins to suspect that his daugher's assailants were emissaries of her employer, a nuclear development facility encoding weapons for covert use.
Review:
Campbell revisits his 1985 BBC thriller for the American market. With a grim-faced Mel Gibson meting out justice to evil-doers, it works pretty well along the lines of a conspiracy thriller, but he is also a weakness: as a cop with a 30 year-old clean record he has more or less carte blanche to apply his particular 'set of skills', making him less an ordinary Joe all at sea, which has a knock-on effect for the Craven-Jedburgh (Winstone) relationship because they are too similar. The producers try to compensate with some sentimental funk involving the daughter's ghost talking to him from the afterlife, which doesn't work anyway (he is still Mad Mel) and certainly not the apotheosis finale.
