OUT NOW: The Guilty (Antoine Fuqua, 2021)

Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a frontline officer who has been relegated to a desk job after an incident in his backstory. When he receives a call from a woman claiming to be kidnapped, he leaps into action.

As the case grows more complicated, Joe uses all of his skills (including a few dubious ones) that cause the situation to escalate even further.

A remake of the Danish thriller, The Guilty will be pretty engrossing if you have never seen the original. If you have seen the original, I am not so sure.

The film is a fairly close adaptation. 

I had rewatched the original again, a couple of weeks ago, so it is still pretty fresh in my mind. Initially I had no intention of watching the remake but lockdown has been long and I ran out of other things to watch.

There are some original touches - the film’s action takes place during a raging fire - but overall, I found it hard to separate this movie from the original. 

The acting throughout is solid (Gyllenhaal makes a good fist of highlighting Joe's bullheaded self-centredness), and Fuqua does a decent job of creating a sense of claustrophobia. He does include a couple of external shots but they are framed to obscure and maintain a sense of distance. While they technically break the film’s unity of place, they do not detract from the tension.

If I have any issue with the movie, it is the climax, which clarifies the central character’s redemption AND alters one of the film’s key revelations (which further feeds into that redemptive arc). While it is not egregious, it does feel like the original text has been softened for a more mainstream audience. 

I do not feel comfortable panning The Guilty. I think it is an effective thriller, but in my case it was too close to the original for me to be fully engrossed.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.