The Guilty: A kind of lazy thriller that isn't so thrilling

There are a few movies out there that I find entertaining where all of the action takes place essentially in the same room or location throughout the entire movie. The film Buried, which is still consider to be one of the most terrifying films of all time took place 99% inside of a coffin that Ryan Reynolds had been buried alive in. There is very little action that takes place outside of this box for the full 90 minutes and yet it still manages to be exceptionally entertaining and to this day is a film that haunts me terribly.

The Guilty on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired and to me it appears as though they were trying to make a film using as little money as possible.

This review is intentionally vague in order to avoid spoilers

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A lot of people are going to watch this movie simply because Netflix basically force-feeds it to you and because it has Jake Gyllenhaal in it, who despite his best attempts in recent times to spoil his name, is still one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood.

Unbeknownst to most people who watched this film, including myself, this movie is actually a remake of a Danish film Den Skyldige that I guess is essentially the same movie. I'm not going to watch the original but a wide-variety of critics panned the Jake version of the film saying that the original is much better. This is not a real shock because most of the time when Hollywood remakes a celebrated film from another country they end up screwing it up. The worst case in which this happened was when they redid Oldboy and I'm still upset that they even attempted to re-do that masterpiece. I think they should re-re-release the original Korean Oldboy in North American cinemas to expose the world to the majesty that is Korean film-making.

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Back to the movie at hand though. In The Guilty we find Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is working in a police emergency call center and throughout the film it is slowly revealed to us that he is actually another kind of cop, one who doesn't sit in an office, but is in trouble for something and has been demoted. Apparently he has to appear in court the following day during the shift that we see him working during this film, and I am not going to tell why that is because it is a major part of the storyline.

He doesn't like his desk job and doesn't really respect his coworkers or even his superior officer who he treats with a sort of disdain throughout the film. The entire story ends up revolving around an emergency call that he gets from a woman who is crying and has been kidnapped. Joe goes above and beyond the call of duty to help her, even though the information that the woman is able to provide him with is very vague since her abductor is in the car with her.

As the film goes on more and more information about this same situation gets given to Joe and some of it is too coincidental for my liking such as other family members of the abducted woman magically ending up having their 911 calls routed to his desk instead of another person's who is in the same room.

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So far, these photos that I have shown probably look like they are the same scene just from different angles and that is kind of the point I am trying to make: A vast majority of the entire film takes place inside of a single room. On one hand, this gives the story and the actors and actresses an opportunity to really shine rather than depending on amazing locations and CGI-driven action, but on the other hand it is also quite boring to be in the same room the entire time. Like I said, this formula sometimes works, but for the most part it doesn't.

In my opinion this one falls flat because although the story does take a few turns that deviate from the typical Hollywood predictable plot-line, it isn't really that shocking once some of the pieces start to fall into place because it becomes pretty evident early on that this film is going to NEED to rely on some sort of "gotcha" moments in order to be entertaining enough to have ever been made in the first place.

Once I would say the first or second clue gets dropped onto your lap at around the 40 minute mark, you can kind of say that you aren't going to be surprised about the rest of what happens. I get what they are trying to do here and if this was filmed during Covid lockdown times that applied even to film-studios, this might be the reason why they decided to make this in the first place. They claim that it was meant for cinematic release but then it gets sold to Netflix for an undisclosed amount of money.

A friend of mine that works in the industry recently told me that almost all films and series are made with the intention of selling them to Netflix, and certain shows like SouthPark have poked fun at the fact that Netflix will buy almost anything.

Should I watch it?

They do a very good job with that trailer and that is why I decided to watch it in the first place. For some people they may find this engaging enough to sit through the entire 90 minutes of "action." I will give them that, the pace gets set pretty early on and it stays that way for the entire time. However, for a lot of people I think that the story simply isn't good enough to make up for the zero changes in scenery. For me, this wasn't a terrible film but one that when I was done watching it, I didn't feel like recommending it to anyone. Therefore this film is just a maybe from me.