The Guilty (2021).

“Broken people save broken people.”

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

Written by (?) Nic Pizzolatto

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and a bunch of people on the phone

The Stage.

A police officer relegated to 911 duty races against the clock to save a kidnapped woman from the confines of his office by using clues from the phone call and his outside resources.

The Review.

If you take The Guilty at face value, it’s a decent thriller with an unexpected twist or two led by a fantastic lead actor in Jake Gyllenhaal. It was filmed during the pandemic and feels claustrophobic, as it was shot in a very limited time and it takes place all in one location.

Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor, an intense police officer with a bad attitude and an empty coffee cup. He lashes out at everyone in the call center, and we quickly learn it’s because he doesn’t want to be there. He’s used to being out on the streets and he’s on phone duty because of punishment. He takes a couple of routine phone calls, snickering at some of the downtrodden, before we get to the heart of our story - a woman calls in, she’s been abducted. Joe makes it his mission to track her down. Gyllenhaal is one of my favorite working actors and he definitely gets a chance to shine yet again as he goes from an inconsiderate dickhead to an inconsiderate dickhead who wants people to do things for him, to a blubbering mess. Most of the other characters get minimal screen time, and certain big name actors are relegated to a sentence or two on the phone, like Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. Easy work, I suppose.

In terms of how the film unfolds, again, if you take the film at face value, it’s probably going to be a pretty tense ride for most people with a rewarding and socially relevant ending. We see Baylor working the phones by looking only at what is in front of him and jumping to conclusions, acting without thinking, mirroring his behavior that we can assume landed him in phone jail to begin with. However, this is a remake of The Guilty, a 2018 Dutch film that I’ve seen and because I have that context, there are some things that really bugged me about this American remake. The fact that Nic Pizzolatto was given a screenplay credit seems a bit funny, considering it’s basically word for word, beat for beat, the same exact film until the last ten minutes, when everyone involved decided that the American version needed to be worse than the original. Like many remakes, they treat The Guilty’s new intended audience like idiots and decided to make the ending fluffier so that we’re nice and relieved as the credits roll.

BIG TIME SPOILERS INCOMING

If you’re still intending to see either of The Guilty films, go ahead and stop reading now. in both versions of the film, we know that our main character has done something pretty bad to get put on desk duty, because a reporter calls to get his side of the story. Angrily, he hangs up with a line about no comment. Cool, we get it. In the Dutch film, that’s all we hear from the reporter. In the American version, we get several calls with the reporter, just in case your dumbass forgot that there was a reporter and that she called him the first time. In the original, we never leave the phone room. In this one, as the police officers pull over a fan, we kind of (?) see the police pulling the van over but the film never commits to leaving the room. It’s only one instance and it’s so absolutely unnecessary, as if the filmmakers were saying, “Look, this is actually happening!”, when it would have been much more effective just to see Gyllenhaal listening to the interaction on his headset.

Now the ending is the most egregious example of making what was once good way worse. In the original film, in order to stop the woman from committing suicide, Asgor Holm tells her what he’s done. He reveals the mystery we’ve all been wondering about to connect with her to stop her from doing what she’s about to do. He killed a man in the line of duty and he knows it was wrong. He admits this out loud in front of his peers, as they watch on in silence. It’s highly effective. In the American version, he tells her in a room by himself, and then after some self-reflection in the bathroom, he calls the reporter and then we get audio over the credit crawl that says he’s plead guilty to manslaughter.

The film also seems to want you to sympathize with cops killing people as in the lead up, it throws a bowl of plot spaghetti at you to see what will tug on your fragile heart strings. Is it the fact that he has asthma something that’ll stick? Because that wasn’t in the original and doesn’t add anything here, even though it continually shows his inhaler. Or maybe the fact that Baylor may have PTSD’ll get ya, since we see him staring longingly at a mental health board through the window on the break room door. Or maybe it’s his beautiful baby girl that he isn’t allowed to talk to that’ll move you. Aw, he’s such a good man though, he told his old partner not to lie on the stand and is going to take responsibility for his actions.

The original ended with both hope and great sadness - sure, Holm stopped the woman from killing herself, but it was a hollow victory as we had found out that she had killed her son. In this film, it went the exact same way…until the end, when we have an officer walk in to tell Baylor that the baby lived after all, and is currently in the ICU. By that point, we had reckoned with the fact that this woman had murdered her child because she’s mentally unstable, we didn’t need the ‘happy’ ending.

The End.

The Guilty is another in a long list of remakes that is far worse than the original. The filmmakers toss all of the trust that the original gave it’s audience into the trash can and then tries to make you sympathize with a cop who unjustly killed a nineteen-year-old kid. Fuck this movie, watch the original instead.