Joe Bailer (Jake Gyllenhaal), without saying a word, is a Class A asshole. The trick doesn’t cover it up. Hopefully, if you’re in an emergency and need to take immediate action.
And call 911, 999 or 112 (depending on what part of the world you’re in). This isn’t someone like Joe from the other side. When a frightened man called after taking drugs, Joe sat down with a scornful attitude.
When a married man is afraid to leave his car after being robbed by a prostitute:
The jeers break into half-muffled laughter as Joe strangles the man from his accident. It turns out that Joe is a cop who was kicked out. While awaiting a controversial shooting trial. He didn’t treat his comrades any better. He had this advantage as if the task was beneath him.
The Guilty unites Gyllenhaal with Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua. Nick Pizzolato, known as a true detective, wrote the script for the Netflix remake of the Danish thriller by Gustav Möller in 2018.
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Shifted the action from an ambulance service in Copenhagen to service in Los Angeles. The first photo shows the wildfires that raged in California last year, and the news reveals a state of emergency.
The large television on the control room wall kept the news flowing. The temperature inside also rose. As the dispatcher was overwhelmed with calls. In these circumstances, prioritizing limited resources makes testing more problematic.
However, the film doesn’t use the take as anything other than background noise. As the conversation that Joe starts with remains the same as the original.
Joe’s night gets worse when he is summoned by a crying woman named Emily (Riley Keow):
Who may have been kidnapped? The woman sounded worried and barely coordinated. Joe’s police instincts popped up right away. He filled in the gaps in his account, data he didn’t provide, with his hunch.
Our judgment is challenged when we assume Joe’s hunch is correct. Joe kept Emily in the loop as he asked her to pretend he was talking to his daughter, slowly trying to understand the details.
She believes Emily’s estranged husband (Paul Dano), a former man in office, is holding her hostage in a white van on the freeway. Her two children, a six-year-old daughter and a baby, live at home alone. He calls and threatens the man he believes the kidnapper while instructing his partner to break into his house to find out more about their whereabouts.
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The dispatcher’s job is to capture all the details and resolve them after handing them over to the First Line Officer. Disappointed by such a record, Joe undertook his investigations. And he did such a terrible job that you wonder how he became a cop.
The most vital scene in the film comes at the end. Sitting on the toilet floor after vomiting:
Joe realizes that his attempts to make amends for the shooting resulted in him passing the same cruel judgment. A phone call with his partner Rick (Eli Gori) told us about some process details.
Drop by drop, more shocking details flow in before the reveal of Act III. And his rescue complex warped his entire interpretation of events.
It turns out Rick wasn’t telling the truth in his testimony to prevent Joe from going to jail. Comments about the culture of police impunity, about the institutionalization of secret treaties in preparation for declarations, are not entirely crushing. But it reflects a very general reality.
Because if justice is to be the same for everyone, police officers shouldn’t get away with a crime so often. When Joe’s supervisor comforts him with the words “Destroyed people save broken people”, he feels like a cop. Pizzolato returns to the alarming symbolism of the police as the corrupted anti-hero.
As you’d expect from a thriller in one place, the sound design outperforms the visual department. With the return of the classic 4:3 ratio, one might think that operator Maz Mahani brought Joe into the game and built tension in the walls so close to him.
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The tension is calibrated by the silence between outside noises. From street noise to police sirens. Connected to a desk in a dark office and locked in his existential prison, Joe begins to unravel as he feels helpless.