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| Image Credit: Jake Gyllenhaal in Netflix film 'The Guilty' |
INFO: Original title: The Guilty | Year: 2021 | Duration: 90 min. | Country: the United States | Direction: Antoine Fuqua: Adapted | screenplay: Nic Pizzolatto | Original script: Emil Nygaard Albertsen, Gustav Möller | Music: Marcelo Zarvos: Photography: Maz Makhani | Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Riley Keough | Production Company: Amet Entertainment, Fuqua Films, Netflix.
The Guilty begins by placing us in a Los Angeles city surrounded by the flames of a huge forest fire. The film immediately focuses on agent Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), a policeman who has been demoted to a call center of the famous 911, the emergency number in the United States. Joe begins to take a call in which a woman appears to have been abducted by a man. It is Joe's last day at the switchboard, before his pending trial, but this will not be a day like any other.
Antoine Fuqua is one of the best "commercial" directors of action today. Titles like Redemption, The Equalizer, Shooter: The Shooter, Target: The White House, or Training Day are good examples of this. But he too is already a regular "remake." After The Magnificent 'Seven' and 'The Equalizer'. The Guilty film is the third remake to his credit.
Having seen the original Danish film The Guilty (2018), it is not impossible to compare with this one, and I also think it is necessary. We quite liked the original, it carried the tension from the beginning of the film and did not slow down practically until the very end. The protagonist's performance was contained in general lines, cold, something that a priori can be thought of as normal in a Scandinavian production. This is not usually bad news, but it does make the emotional part not so strong, we are warm-blooded and it is more difficult for us to empathize with more relaxed societies.
In this The Guilty, we have an irate Jake Gyllenhaal, who may seem over-acted at times, but who seems to us to be excellent in his role as his broken person, with sudden mood swings and a great facility for anger. This means that at times it can take us a little out of the film, but I also think that it makes us feel that character closer and we can understand him better. This remake is more emotional than the original. On the contrary, it seemed to me that he is not capable of maintaining tension like the other one, and especially up to the middle of the footage, he has many passages that become a bit heavy.
The Guilty is an almost traced remake of The Guilty. Most of the situations that occur and even the phrases that the characters say are the same. The substantial change does not come to an end and from what think I remember it is not that I change it completely, but rather that some fragment is told in a different order. I think it becomes more emotionally narrated in the way that Fuqua does and it becomes more natural. I find it a good remake, at least quite close to the quality of the original film.
The Guilty is one of those films with a single scenario, practically based on the interpretive work of Jake Gyllenhaal. A good thriller with an effective twist, although it could have a better rhythm in some parts, you can not ask for much more in these types of products.
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