The best that can be said about Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty is that it captures how calm and intensity work hand in hand within its confined setting. Otherwise, though, this remake of Gustav Möller’s Danish 2018 thriller fails to justify its reason for being beyond the need to repackage a genre exercise for American filmgoers who are still stopped in their tracks by, in the words of Bong Joon-ho, “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.”
The Guilty centers on a cop, Joe Bayter (Jake Gyllenhaal), who’s been assigned to a 911 dispatch center pending trial for a case that’s left unspecified for much of the runtime, though it’s clear from the start that it involves an incident of police brutality. Quick-tempered, anxious, and eager to get back out on the street, Joe has obvious detection skills, which are put to the test when he realizes that a seeming prank call from a woman, Emily (Riley Keough), is a clandestine plea for help, as she’s been abducted by her partner, Henry (Paul Dano).
From there, the film goes through all the same motions as Möller’s original. Every time Joe pegs Emily to be at a general location on an animated map, his frantic efforts to get patrolling officers to her often results in him overstepping his boundaries and complicating the situation. Fuqua dials back on the antic visual energy for which he’s known, judiciously anchoring scenes on close-ups of Joe’s face as he struggles to stay calm while waiting for updates. The camera cuts around him to add a sense of visual dynamism to the limited dimensions of the setup but never devolves into overly busy movement just for its own sake.
This makes for engaging, no-frills entertainment, but, then, the same was true of the original. The biggest changes to the material are the dollops of contemporary American relevance. Screens in the dispatch center report on the wildfires that are engulfing Los Angeles, but this backdrop never brings any added gravitas to the narrative, as it exists only to frustrate Joe over how police operations are at a standstill and can’t get to Emily at a moment’s notice.
Fuqua and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto also more pointedly focus on systemic corruption, with Joe actively colluding with colleagues to help him ensure the not-guilty verdict in his investigation that they think is a foregone conclusion. By the same token, they soften the edges of the central character. As played by Jakob Cedergren in Möller’s film, Asger Holm leaps to the rescue of an imperiled woman as much out of concern for her as for the self-centered need to help boost his case ahead of going into trial. By contrast, you never get a sense that there’s any ulterior motives to Joe as he scrambles to save Emily’s life, even when he’s at his most explosive. And for a film that’s so obviously intent on acknowledging the problematic nature of angry police responses, that’s the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.
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