The Guilty

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

★★½

THE GUILTY: JAKE GYLLENHAAL as JOE BAYLER. CR: NETFLIX © 2021.

It isn’t a shock to anyone that Hollywood fetishizes remakes, especially of foreign films that do well overseas, thus it is no surprise that The Guilty (a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name) has fallen onto our screens.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, who himself is no stranger to remakes (The Magnificent Seven, King Arthur and the currently in production Cat On A Hot Tin Roof), has crafted a bottle-set thriller about a disgraced police officer named Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is stuck working as a 911 operator until a case against him is cleared up. Joe takes a call from a kidnapped woman and does everything he can to save her from the end of a phone.

While I’m sure the one-set model was meant to be creative in the COVID-era of filmmaking, it comes off demonstratively claustrophobic in execution. The idea behind filming this way (besides the COVID aspect) undoubtedly is to make the audience feel as trapped as Joe does, however it just feels tedious and grating as it goes along, no matter how Gyllenhaal is.

And Gyllenhaal is expectedly great, a dedicated performer, he is able to make the frustrating dialogue and Fuqua’s stylistic blandness watchable. But even as good as he is, Gyllenhaal can’t save the film from being such a curious malaise. And neither can the bombast of talent that we only hear voice performances of including Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard, Bill Burr and Paul Dano, who are all great, but the film leaves you wanting to see more of them and less of Gyllenhaal. 

The Guilty also attempts to redeem a certain character at the end of the film, which doesn’t sit well in the current political climate.
For all its worth, The Guilty is a passable, frustrating thriller with a solid lead performance from Gyllenhaal that thankfully will be on Netflix, so no need to pay for it!