It could have been a good movie but a whole lot of plot strings are twisted into confusing strands and so you really don’t know what they are trying to say. Some of it is to provide twists in the movie that makes you go ‘Ah, I did not see that coming’ but it is too complex that it takes away, at least for me, from the pleasures of seeing a simple tale unfold. There are also sudden twists that really make you go, ‘Hm that is totally out of character for this person’.
Mel Gibson does his part as he normally does, in his usual style, and you get a sense of the actor in the part, and not the living character as some method actors are capable of conjuring up.
Now for the story. Mel plays Thomas Craven. He has lost his wife and his grown up daughter lives apart and there seem to be a distance between them. At the start of the movie, he picks her up and she seems preoccupied. She suddenly gets a nosebleed, asks dad to ignore it and violently throws up. The terrified dad takes her to the front door, meaning to take her to the hospital only to be met by a masked man who cries his name loudly before shooting – killing the daughter instead.
A totally broken Thomas and the police department think it is an accident that the daughter got killed as Thomas, a detective, has made many enemies in his work. But he discovers his daughter had packed a gun for the visit and begins to now think that his daughter may have been the real target and sets out to investigate, against the advice of the police colleagues to rest and recuperate mentally.
His investigations yield results. He discovers that the gun belonged to Emma’s boyfriend. The boyfriend admits that Emma was disturbed about illegal nuclear firearms Northmoor, the company she worked for was making to export to foreign countries to make ‘dirty bombs’. When she tried to expose the company clandestinely with the help of some activists, she was poisoned by the company. Hence the nosebleed (really?) and the hard vomiting.
He meets Jedburgh, a ‘consultant’ sent to stop him from exposing the company secrets but who understands the anguish of the father and leaves him alone for a while.
He tracks the killing to Jack Bennett, the head of Northmoor, and then finds out evidence that the bodyguards of the head were the ones who killed his own daughter. He violently (he is Mel Gibson after all) tracks down and kills them.
Meanwhile, Jack, fearing that he is losing control of his secret, manages to poison Thomas with Thallium, a radioactive poison – using the same poison and the same method (mixing it in milk in a carton) that they used against the daughter earlier.
What follows is an action scene with violence galore. Thomas manages to kill Bennett but we realize that the rot goes higher to the Senator. Thomas is in the hospital, sick.
The senator gets killed unexpectedly by an unexpected person with a lame excuse as to why.
Powerful, but confusing.
I will leave it at that. It has a mixed up plot – some scandal, some cover ups, some righteous indignation, some misdirection.
An OK show, I guess.
5/10
– – Krishna
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