After how well the remake of The Guilty turned out, I was more than willing to give this film a chance. An American remake of a British TV miniseries, starring Sandra Bullock in a consciously-against-type role of a woman who has just been released from a 20-year stint in prison for murder. It certainly caught my attention just from that setup, and I can already see all manner of possibilities for thoughtful translation between cultures. But unfortunately, just about every major decision here feels backwards.
Just for context, the original miniseries is only 21 minutes than this film version; this isn’t some Herculean adaptation job being done here. And yet looking at the final product, you’d think it was adapted from something much larger, because that’s the only way to explain how many gaps are in this thing. It definitely has the narrative scope of a miniseries, in how it highlights secondary characters just as much as the mains, but for how charged the clashes between them can get, it doesn’t feel like they were given enough development to really let the moral ambiguities show through.
For another, this is an American film with a main character who just got out of prison for killing a police officer… and there isn’t any awareness of the public perception of law enforcement in any of its observations. It does a lot of pondering about the nature of justice vs. revenge, and juxtaposing Bullock’s Ruth Slater, her time spent in the system, and how the way she is treated once on the outside effectively means she’s still a part of that system. However, in all that space, it lacks a more pointed edge in its perspective that would probably have warranted this remake existing in the first place. I mean, regardless of one’s own stance on the issue, this film going so far to bring up its consequences without even acknowledging the system in place… it just feels like a big missed opportunity.
What makes all of this even more disappointing is that, fucking hell, Sandra Bullock is really giving her all to this performance. She spends a lot of her screen time portraying the trauma her character has gone through, and how much her actions are still affecting her, and she is astoundingly good at getting all that across. It’s a rare feat to get into a shouting match with Viola Davis and still be able to hold your own, but that’s what Bullock manages to pull off here. Hell, the rest of the cast are also very good in their roles, from Vincent D’Onofrio as a lawyer, Will Pullen as the son of the dead officer, and especially Aisling Franciosi as her younger sister who is shouldering her own trauma from the event.
However, in addition to the mishandling with the continental switch-up, the way the script gets into the moral dilemmas and comments on the justice system is not only very lopsided, it leads up to a plot twist that kneecaps the film’s ambitions of taking the subject seriously. Admittedly, said twist adds a certain layer of intrigue to what’s going on, but it’s also one of the bigger cop-outs I’ve seen in a while.
It’s just such a damn shame, because on the basis of Sandra Bullock’s performance on its own, this film could’ve easily coasted on some murky Secret In Their Eyes-esque thrills. But because it lacks enough specificity to effectively comment on the social and legal structures that gave way to the events in-story, and because it softballs the issues one too many times, it reduces a compelling character piece and potentially effective timeliness in its messaging to just a generic and weirdly threadbare thriller. And that’s without getting into contemplating what this would’ve looked like if Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed it, as was the plan at one point in this production’s history.
No comments:
Post a Comment