Movie Review - The Guilty (2021)

The original film of the same name was the official submission to the 91st Academy Awards for Best International Feature, née Best Foreign Language Film, from Denmark. It didn't get nominated, but it did make the Oscars shortlist in 2018. Jake Gyllenhaal apparently saw the film and bought the rights to it. Gyllenhaal started producing films in addition to acting in them with End of Watch (2012), a film in which he played a police officer. Before he could both produce and star in this remake, he was pulled into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019). He had four other films he had produced in the pipeline, but, before he could move forward with this remake, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Luckily, this film is an easy film to produce even during a pandemic like coronavirus because it involves one man on screen by himself for the majority of it. Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day and Olympus Has Fallen) was even able to manage this film using social distancing.

Gyllenhaal stars as Joe Baylor, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. Like End of Watch, Joe presumably was a patrolman who drove the streets with a partner. However now, he's in what's called the LAPD Communications unit, which is the unit that runs the police dispatch and the 911 phone-line. Currently, Joe is a 911 operator and he doesn't seem happy about it. He seems frustrated and cynical about having this job. It seems like this is not the job he wanted and is in fact a punishment for him, but, throughout the film, we don't know what the reason is for his possible punishment.

One might think that his reason for being a 911 operator has to do with his asthma. He works in Los Angeles and as we see, there are wildfires all over the place, which doesn't help the air quality. Joe's asthma would seem to be antithetical to his ability to be outside on the streets. Yet, there are allusions to a possible court hearing he has tomorrow. The entire film takes place all in one day or in real-time actually, but there are references to a court hearing that involves something Joe did. At the same time, Joe is trying to call the mother of his child because he wants to talk to his daughter.

Whatever is happening in Joe's personal life takes a backseat when Joe gets an emergency call from a woman who has been abducted or kidnapped. Joe becomes obsessed with helping this woman escape her kidnapper. What's strange is that it seems as if her kidnapper is allowing her to have a phone and make phone calls. It seems like a contrivance that allows Joe to be the hero here. Perhaps due to his hero complex, Joe doesn't stop to consider why that might be the case. He's able to learn that the woman's children have been abandoned at home, so he's desperate and has an urgency to try to find the woman and stop her kidnapper.

The film does a good job of being a thriller that escalates with nothing more than Gyllenhaal's face and the vocal performances from the various actors whom we only hear over Joe's phone headset. Fuqua directed Gyllenhaal previously in Southpaw (2015), which was a very physical performance, as Gyllenhaal played a boxer. There were a lot of intense emotions there, but Gyllenhaal gets a vehicle to have even more intense emotions where he's sitting for pretty much the entire time. If he got his second Oscar nomination for acting here, it would be well deserved.

Finally, this film does have a bit of relevance to what's been happening in the United States, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd's murder. The police officer who killed George Floyd is Derek Chauvin and his trial was all about him trying to escape the charges and the responsibilities. Obviously, we don't want police officers doing such things at all, but if they do, we would like for them to own up to what they did and take their punishment or allow justice to run its course. This film doesn't provide the opportunity for Joe not to do the bad thing at all, but it does provide the opportunity for him to own up. The film puts us in the position of identifying and maybe sympathizing with someone like Chauvin, which is probably not where we want to be, but at least the film underlines how wrong he is.

Rated R for language throughout.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 31 mins.

Available on Netflix.