Mel Gibson, in his first starring role in eight years, comes back strong, and gracefully aged, as a Boston police officer tracking down his daughter’s shotgun killer. The detective work — the mistaken first assumption is that the detective himself was the intended target — is solid and followable, and it offers a fair share of ah-ha moments. (Nice one: the lock of the daughter’s hair snipped on the coroner’s slab later reads as radioactive on the Geiger counter in her personal effects.) If the investigation depends overmuch on bullish Dirty Harry tactics to move it along, it at least pulls up short of the overscaled action — the outrageous chases, the explosions, the Hong Kong combat — that has so numbed the contemporary action film. There are other ways to heighten the scale, however. And at this late date we can scarcely be surprised, we can at best be resigned, that a grade-A mainstream murder mystery (based, like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Kevin Macdonald’s State of Play, on a British TV miniseries) would lead ultimately to matters of national security and nuclear weaponry. Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic, Caterina Scorsone; directed by Martin Campbell. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd