At its most philosophical, Edge of Darkness is a discourse about our inevitable journey towards death. At its least philosophical, it’s a discourse on the inevitable journey of a tough cop with nothing to lose. That Edge of Darkness wants to be both philosophical and tough makes it a bit like sitting through a 90-minute funeral with a bad-ass preacher heading the procedures.

It doesn’t help that Mel Gibson shows up looking deathly gaunt and a bit like my old high-school janitor. If this is Gibson’s swan song to the lone-wolf hardened cop characters he’s based a career on, he’s a bit late. We’ve already made peace with the passing of our beloved Mad Max, Braveheart and loony Martin Riggs from the Lethal Weapon series the day Gibson went all “sugar tits” over an L.A. police officer.

The film opens with three mysteries: three bodies bubble to the surface of a dark moonlit lake overlooked by an auspicious and towering industrial complex; a beloved daughter is violently ill but refuses to explain; a lone gunman hollers a name and takes a life. Even the most casual viewer could probably find answers to all three of these mysteries within the first 30 minutes. The rest of the time is spent waiting for every other character to catch up with what the audience already knows. Eventually they do and the movie does get better when it finds its way back to the cop-versus-political-baddies format the trailers seemed to promise.

There is such a thing as too much plot and Edge has it. Occasionally the film seems content to mix genres giving the film a kind of Grisham-novel-maverick-cop-meets-Bond-villains feeling. This is most apparent in the ultimate showdown that takes place in a CG-contrived complex that looks more like Dr. Evil's lair than a state-of-the-art government facility. There are a lot of characters in this film – including a senator, a political spin doctor, a contract killer, a naturalist, a boyfriend, a best buddy, shadowy gunmen and an industrial CEO – turning this into a rather unnecessarily convoluted mystery. The distance between each of these characters would make them seem unrelated if this type of cop format didn’t already prepare us for some kind of complex conspiracy. The connection between all grows clearer as each in turn has their moment of getting punched in the face, proving that there is nothing like gratuitous violence to pull a plot together.

I'm not one to slag originality, but sometimes the familiar is good, and Edge is best when it abides by the rules of expectation rather than toying outside the genre. There’s no real guessing as to who the heavies are; they're the ones in neckties that are polite to the point of being condescending. And we pretty much know what will happen to those who nervously – and everyone who isn’t a heavy in this movie is inordinately nervous – decide to help the determined Craven (Gibson).

Edge of Darkness is not quite better than you would expect, but it is better than nothing. And for a late-January release, that’s fair praise.