Antoine Fuqua’s movies are like a greatest hits collection: King Arthur, The Magnificent Seven, Training Day, Brooklyn’s Finest, Tears of the Sun, Shooter, Olympus Has Fallen, and The Equalizer, to name but eight.
His movies often take a stroll on the wild side, while going strong in their broken places as the line between good and evil is blurred to hazily underline the wooly appeal of each movie’s cast member to a variety of cinephiles.
“The Guilty” does not stray too far from this tried-and-true formula, thematically speaking.
Jake Gyllenhaal is the lead in this one and, wait a minute, how do you pronounce Gyllenhaal?
His name and McConaughey’s twist my tongue with a Red lorry, yellow lorry vengeance.
Anyway, I won’t be getting it twisted when I say he delivers an utterly inspired performance in this film.
As a cop called Joe Baylor on the night shift in a 911 dispatch center, he is in a very bad way.
Los Angeles seems to be on fire as he fiddles with his inhaler.
Yep, he’s as an asthmatic, but it gets worse: Joe is wrestling with an issue that hangs over his head like a Damoclean sword.
Oh yes, this seemingly ordinary Joe has some extraordinary torments which are threatening to break out of the cage of his personality and play havoc with his already disastrous life.
To add to this laundry list, the LA smog is making his asthma worse and he’s dealing with a separation from his family.
He misses his daughter dearly and just wants to talk with her. But his estranged wife wants him out of their lives.
Against this background, he is not the best person to be handling callers as he tends to project his actual misery onto the presumed misery of others.
Then, everything changes.
Joe gets a call from a seemingly frightened woman named Emily (Riley Keough, whose excellent voice acting should win her a spoken word statuette at the Academy Awards).
She’s in trouble and Joe soon learns that Emily’s six-year-old daughter and newborn son are home alone, without the comedy of manners of Macaulay Culkin.
Joe, a broken man, decides to save Emily and her family, even though he doesn’t seem to know what or whom he is saving them from.
In the process, Joe barks at and breaks things he thinks are getting in the way of his quest to do the right thing.
He seems like he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown, possibly because he has become personally invested in saving Emily or simply because he is going to appear in court the next day for mistakes he made on the job.
It’s puzzling, you want to root for him but his desperation leaves no room for your sympathy as it fills out every frame of this 90-minute film.
The emotion is so intense that you will accept he’s a good cop only to learn that he’s a rogue cop, too. And before you get used to that, you realize that he’s a good man who happens to be bad.
Gyllenhaal expertly embodies every element of the human spirit with his mercurial performance.
It is clear that every fracture in his broken personality allows either darkness to seep in or light to shine through.
In the end, you agree that he has lived up to one of the best lines in the film: Broken people save broken people.
