I wish there were a hotline for Hollywood executives to call that would send help to them depending on the situation, much like an emergency services dispatcher. Did somebody break into your neighbor's house? Send the police. Is there a fire at the nearby pizza place? Send the firemen. Your loved one choking on an olive? Send an ambulance. Thinking of remaking a foreign film that's only three years old? Send me. I'll set things straight for you.
Unfortunately, no such Hollywood dispatcher exists, which is how Antoine Fuqua, the director behind Training Day, Nic Pizzolatto, the writer behind True Detective, and Jake Gyllenhaal, the actor behind the "celebrities refusing to shower" scandal, were able to remake the 2018 Danish film Den Skyldige. Gustav Möller's thriller, which translates to "The Guilty," was a highlight of 2018, praised by audiences and critics alike. Though we are only a few years removed, The Guilty is already remembered as one of the best foreign language films of 2018, alongside Burning, Shoplifters, and Roma. That's not bad company.
The Guilty (2018) follows an emergency services dispatcher in Copenhagen who struggles to locate and save the life of an abducted woman calling for help. It takes place in real time, entirely within the confines of the dispatch station, and features only one main performance, from Jakob Cedergren. It is simultaneously heart-racing and slow-burning, pouring on the anxiety, while carefully navigating plot turns and character building. Gustav Möller's The Guilty operates on a masterful level, giving audiences everything they could ever ask for from a one-man thriller. And yet, Fuqua, Pizzolatto, and Gyllenhaal were sure there was more for the thriller to give.
They were wrong.
-MILD SPOILERS AHEAD-
It's difficult to talk about The Guilty (2018) without sounding overly simplistic. One guy talking on the phone for an hour and a half, trying to save a woman's life. That's it. That's the movie. It really is that simple. But, of course, the American version is much more complicated, and that's where it loses so much of the original's thrill.
To start, the opening shot of Fuqua's remake is a skyline shot of Los Angeles. The sky is orange, and helicopters swoop in from the left, careening towards the fiery mountain sides east of L.A. This isn't just a normal rainy night in Copenhagen. This is Los Angeles on the brink of natural disaster, otherwise known as a normal night in California. But with wildfires threatening the - by all accounts - lovely residents of the Valley, it is clear from the outset of the film that the stakes are higher. And the film operates under those higher stakes for all ninety minutes of its runtime.
Poor Cedergren only had one computer monitor, while Gyllenhaal gets like five.
Where Jakob Cedergren's singular performance in the original was muted, with flashes of rage, Jake Gyllenhaal's is the opposite. His character, Joe, is loud and mean, the spitting image of everything American police departments have been trying to separate themselves from over the last few years. He is also very clearly the "protagonist" of the film. If you haven't seen the original, then you might not understand why that's a problem.
One of the reasons 2018's The Guilty works so well is that the story doesn't revolve around officer Asger, the dispatcher, instead it flows through him. Asger is but a conduit for the real story, the abduction of Iben. The same cannot be said for this American version. In what few changes there were to the screenplay, Nic Pizzolatto made sure to shift the focus back to the dispatcher. Whole scenes were added to build sympathy for Jake Gyllenhaal's Joe, including an ill-timed phone call with his separated partner, a poorly executed yearning to parent his young daughter, and an upcoming misconduct trial that serves as a major plot point, rather than the looming background setting it was originally conceived as. Gyllenhaal, likewise, makes the movie about himself. As much as I adore him as an actor, there's no denying the overacting the runs rampant throughout the film. Maybe that wouldn't be a huge problem under normal circumstances, but when you've seen the performance executed perfectly before, it's almost impossible to stack up, especially when the scenes centered around Joe feel so out of place within the larger storyline.
A surprising amount of this remake takes place in the bathroom for some reason.
There are other scenes from the original however that went almost entirely untouched. Most of them, honestly. Antoine Fuqua's The Guilty isn't at times a beat-for-beat remake of the original, it's a word-for-word carbon copy.
That being said, it takes more than some scriptwriting plagiarism to capture lightning in a bottle twice, and unfortunately Fuqua doesn't have the touch to capture it here. Stylistically the two films couldn't be further apart. Where the original was monochromatic, dull, and quiet, the Americanized movie is bright, fast-paced, and explosive. There is no chewing the fat in this California version. When one phone call ends, the next begins. There's no time to stew in the anxiety of not knowing what will happen to the abducted victim at the heart of the film, no time to process the news from the last call, no time to wait. And that's what The Guilty (2018) was really about. Waiting.
Perfect lighting. Absolutely perfect.
The essence of emergency dispatch is waiting; waiting for the next call, waiting for another emergency, waiting to hear if you responded quickly and effectively enough. There is no waiting in Fuqua's version. To keep it simple, I didn't much care what happened in his movie, because I never had time to. The Guilty (2021) took a brilliant bare-boned premise and added to it ad nauseam. Ultimately, it's too many emergencies, too many twists, too much yelling, and too many calls.
Unfortunately, none of those callers told them to hang it up.
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