Assigned to emergency services dispatch duty while under investigation, a
cop becomes invested in the plight of an abducted woman.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgard, Ethan
Hawke, Paul Dano
What's the point of English language remakes of foreign language
movies? Well, some people are xenophobes. Others refuse to read
subtitles. Some are xenophobes who refuse to read subtitles. The
argument is often made that a Hollywood remake brings the story to a
larger audience, but in this age of streaming that doesn't really hold
up anymore.
Until quite recently, director Gustav Möller's gripping 2018 feature
debut
The Guilty
was available to stream on Netflix. It seems to have been taken down to
make way for a new Hollywood remake directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Rather than spending millions on remaking Möller's film, couldn't
Netflix have just promoted the original while it was in their library?
Will Fuqua's version even be promoted, or like so many Netflix
originals, will it disappear into the void of the streaming service's
algorithm? Who is it for? Would the sort of people who will watch this
new version of The Guilty really turn their noses up at
the original because it was made by Johnny Foreigner? Did Netflix
examine their data and see that a lot of people clicked play on Möller's
original only to disconnect upon realising it required them to read
subtitles?
I'm not opposed to the idea of American remakes of foreign films (or vice versa), so
long as they justify their existence beyond negating the audience from
having to endure subtitles or the presence of non-Anglo-Saxons.
Sometimes Hollywood can bring extra resources to a film, like William
Friedkin's Sorcerer, which used the might of '70s Hollywood to beef up
The Wages of Fear's tense action sequences. Sometimes an American remake brings a new
cultural specificity and setting to a film, like how
The Magnificent Seven transplants
The Seven Samurai to the Old West in bombastic
fashion.
Fuqua's remake brings nothing new to the table. What could it? It's a
movie about a man speaking on a phone that takes place in two rooms. It
exists purely to cater to people who won’t watch foreign films, for
whatever reason.
Möller's original borrowed the template I believe was established by
the Levinson and Link scripted 1975 TV movie A Cry for Help. In that film Robert Culp played a blowhard radio shock jock who
receives a call from a suicidal listener. As he tries to talk her out of
taking her life while attempting to track down her location, the camera
stays in the DJ's booth, letting Culp do the heavy lifting of telling
the story on his own.
In Möller's film, this idea is transferred to a police dispatch centre
where a disgraced cop awaiting trial for a misdeed receives a call from
a young woman who has seemingly been abducted and is being driven out of
the city in a white van.
In this remake, screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto sticks almost
devoutly to the original's script. Jake Gyllenhaal takes the role
of LAPD officer Joe Baylor, who has been forced to man a dispatch centre
cubicle while he awaits trial. Using his cop's instincts, Baylor
attempts to save the abducted woman (voiced here by Riley Keough)
while growing frustrated by the lax attitude of his colleagues in Los
Angeles' various emergency services.
If your film requires one actor to be onscreen alone for almost its
entire running time, you could do a lot worse than Gyllenhaal. He's one
of America's finest actors, but it's only while watching him here and
comparing his performance to that of his Danish cousin Jakob Cedergren
that I realised just how American Gyllenhaal is. He's very, very good
here, but in comparison to Cedergren's naturalistic performance he comes
off as broad and theatrical, the veins in his forehead positively
bursting as Baylor grows more and more agitated.
Having seen the original, and since this follows its plot beat by beat,
it's difficult for me to assess whether the remake works. Knowing every
twist before it arrives means my experience is very different to that of
a viewer unfamiliar with the plot. What I did notice is how inferior
Fuqua's visual storytelling is compared to Möller's. While both versions
of The Guilty are heavily reliant on dialogue, the Danish
director still found ways to heighten the tension visually, with some
nerve-wracking moments where the protagonist's finger hovers over
buttons that are notably absent here. Instead, Fuqua throws in some
pointless visual gimmicks like odd visualisations of the events Baylor
is listening to, which only serve to temporarily pull us out of the
story. As though a chunk of the budget needed to be eaten up, Fuqua's
film opens with a completely pointless shot of helicopters flying over a
burning Los Angeles that wouldn't be out of place in a Michael Bay
movie. In the Danish film, Möller uses brief moments of silence to build
tension; such moments are all too rare in Fuqua's noisier remake.
Perhaps what marks this as a mainstream American remake most of all is
how it treats its audience as idiots who can't figure out the movie's
theme for themselves. Möller allowed us to put two and two together, but
Fuqua has a character appear onscreen at the end and literally speak the
theme of the movie.
In summary, if you're only going to watch one version of
The Guilty, make it the original. If you're watching both, watch the original
first. If you refuse to watch the original and only intend to watch this
version, you'll be entertained but missing out on a gem of recent
European cinema.
