An detective father (Mel Gibson) was enjoying his daughter’s company when she was gunned down in front of his own house. What ensues were a grieving father’s pursuit of the killers and the scheme that involved a big-company’s conspiracy. Mel Gibson was his usual super-charged self with a very good reason to be very angry.

There were lots of actions and interesting conversations between Tom and the hired killer, who reminds of me the consultant in the “Pulp Fiction.” The quotes, “everything is illegal in Massachusetts” was cliche but funny and spoke volume of the liberal state. The quote about “officer involved” was ironic when the one that sold Tom out was his own boss.

The action was good and the twists and turns kept me guessing. Very nice. A summary is as follows (Stop here if you plan to watch the movie and haven’t watched yet).

Tom Craven heard only the shout of “Craven” when a shot gun showered the bullets on his only daughter’s body. Prior to that, they were shopping and sitting down for a homemade dinner. Due to the vomiting and nose bleeding, Emma Craven was about to be rushed to hospital when the shooting occurred. Tom couldn’t imagine his little Emma could have elicited such a violent revenge from anyone until he ran into her scared, paranoid boyfriend, who mistook Tom for the surveillance team outside of his apartment and got into a big fight.

Eventually he had some misgivings about Emma’s employer, Northmoor, after seeing the CEO of the company. Through Emma’s close friend, he discovered that Emma was about to whistle-blew on her employer about some conspiracy, which involved creation of nuclear weapon for foreign countries in order to sustain the R & D team of the company. To expose the conspiracy, she engineered a break-in by a third-party organization that resulted in their being murdered. She was also poisoned by hired guns of Northmoor.

The senator was involved in the cover up as well. The shocking thing is that at the end the hired killer/consultant of the senator, touched by Tom’s sincerity and genuine love for his daughter and his country, turned against the senator and killed the senator and all of his cronies and, of course, got himself killed.

Betrayed by his own police boss, Tom was kidnapped to be poisoned by radiation but he escaped and confronted the killers at the company CEO’s home and killed them all. He finally died from his death bed and joined his daughter in the “better” place.