The Guilty (2021)

 Score: 2.5 / 5

Typical of Hitchcockian fare, The Guilty operates as a man-on-the-phone thriller that hinges on his own reliability as a protagonist. Joe Baylor was an officer in the LAPD before an event disgraced him, demoted him to a 9-1-1 dispatcher, and now has him set to go to court. The event apparently involved no small amount of controversy, and so he furtively looks around the call center and avoids the gaze of others. He regularly uses his inhaler -- too often, in fact; one wonders if it's his stress level, or if he was already asthmatic and the raging wildfires are exacerbating his condition. Indeed, his workplace features a large wall of televisions tuned in to ongoing news reports of an inferno encroaching on Los Angeles. Among his regular calls, he must shut down the attempts of reporters sneakily trying to get his inside scoop. And then there are the calls he makes to his estranged family, trying to say a simple "good night" to his young daughter.

He's clearly not handling the stress well, and as played by Jake Gyllenhaal, the character clearly has some issues with anger management, bedside manner, and snap judgments. His short temper leads him to argue with a panicked caller who has apparently been robbed by a prostitute in one of the film's few comedic moments. Another time, more cruelly, he criticizes a caller for substance abuse; scenes like these stand in stark contrast to the main plot: he gets a call from a terrified woman (Riley Keough) who he surmises has been abducted. He quickly learns that she has a six-year-old daughter who may be in danger, too. Immediately (and alarmingly) invested in the case, he tries to operate as both a responding officer and a dispatcher, jumping from phone line to phone line to corral the necessary units. In the hands of Gyllenhaal, it's a master class in acting from the most consistently unpredictable and excellent actors working today.

But, in the hands of writer Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective) and director Antoine Fuqua (The Magnificent Seven, Southpaw, King Arthur), the film's tone and themes vacillate wildly. What starts as a character-based thriller becomes an oddly unwieldy radio play of voices and ideas that reverberate without really sticking. Joe's rash responses -- including swearing to help Emily and her daughter without having enough information -- reveal the film's dubious critique of toxic white maleness in the American police system. His ignorant bravado and possessive masculinity cause serious problems and result in further violence, but the film's constant attempts to elicit our sympathy through Joe's well-meaning demeanor undermine the critique. I suppose we could be grateful this didn't lean into any discussions about Defunding the Police; instead, we get a watered-down survey of concepts relating to hegemonic cops in disgrace.

This movie's waste of potential themes notwithstanding, it's a wildly entertaining time because of Fuqua's focus on his greatest asset. Gyllenhaal is in almost every scene and still steals the movie, committing his every breath to conveying the inner (and often outer) turmoil of his character. His operatic finale rang a little melodramatic to me, but that's pretty standard for Fuqua's flicks. The movie occasionally overemploys typical thriller devices to ramp up the tension, like the approximate GPS he uses to track callers or the hellish flames projected from the rear wall of the office. And so, all in all, it's a reasonably good time at the movies if you want to rest your artistic intelligence and let the mellow side of darker thrillers carry you along.