I don't know why I bothered; I figured this would be a pointless Anglophone remake of the tense 2018 Danish thriller. I also don't know why this Nic Pizzolatto guy has his own screenwriting credit here when most of it's lifted straight from the original. I guess he's taking credit for the rearrangement of a scene that results in unnecessarily dragging out the resolution so that we may see Jake Gyllenhaal's puke in a toilet, or for adding that 2am phone call to the ex that just makes Gyllenhaal's Joe all the more unbearable, and let's not forget that time Joe gets up to get a cup of joe, and he's displeased there's not enough already made for him. What I've seen from director Antoine Fuqua, too, gives the impression of a hacky filmmaker. The Denzel Washington movies are entertaining enough, because Denzel Washington, but the rest of them.... "Southpaw" (2015), also starring Gyllenhaal, is an overrated melodrama. I have yet to see "The Magnificent Seven" (2016) remake, but I'm not looking forward to it.
This seems to be sheer incompetence to me, as if they had no idea what worked in the original, and, Instead of adding a novel interpretation, just watered it down with generics. Gustav Möller's picture was a one-man variation on "12 Angry Men" (1957) with an emphasis on sound in the emergency phone calls. An intensely claustrophobic utilization of the artifice of cinema. So, of course, for the remake they begin with a Bible verse and helicopter shots to needlessly attempt thematic grandeur and paint the background with California wildfires. Also unnecessary dramatic scoring to blow the intensity and subtlety of the sound design. Gyllenhaal spends the first part in an enormous glass-filled tomb to International Style architecture with a series of big screen TVs for the wildfire background and multiple monitors for each dispatcher like we're watching a high-tech hacker or spy movie. Saving the spectator the hassle of having to use their own imagination by the movie visualizing what Joe sees in his mind listening to a couple calls is especially inept.
Oh, and Gyllenhaal can't help himself with the histrionics. It's bad enough they gave him an asthma inhaler to work with. I really miss the beads of sweat rolling down Jakob Cedergren's brow during his pregnant pauses compared to Gyllenhaal's spray-on sweat and crocodile tears as he shouts belligerently and pounds on glass windows. There's nothing that quite lowers one's estimation of an actor than to see him do so much more poorly in the same role performed by another just a couple years ago. Ditto the other filmmakers. At least Washington seemed to realize what he got himself into with with Fuqua in "Training Day" (2001) and "The Equalizer" (2014) and so turned up the acting even more over-the-top than usual to deliver us a bounty of ham.
I would think that an easy bar for whether a remake should exist would be that it improves on or differs from the original in at least one interesting way. Yet, this one is nonetheless guilty of failing that test. Oh well, at least it got me to watch the Danish original.
This seems to be sheer incompetence to me, as if they had no idea what worked in the original, and, Instead of adding a novel interpretation, just watered it down with generics. Gustav Möller's picture was a one-man variation on "12 Angry Men" (1957) with an emphasis on sound in the emergency phone calls. An intensely claustrophobic utilization of the artifice of cinema. So, of course, for the remake they begin with a Bible verse and helicopter shots to needlessly attempt thematic grandeur and paint the background with California wildfires. Also unnecessary dramatic scoring to blow the intensity and subtlety of the sound design. Gyllenhaal spends the first part in an enormous glass-filled tomb to International Style architecture with a series of big screen TVs for the wildfire background and multiple monitors for each dispatcher like we're watching a high-tech hacker or spy movie. Saving the spectator the hassle of having to use their own imagination by the movie visualizing what Joe sees in his mind listening to a couple calls is especially inept.
Oh, and Gyllenhaal can't help himself with the histrionics. It's bad enough they gave him an asthma inhaler to work with. I really miss the beads of sweat rolling down Jakob Cedergren's brow during his pregnant pauses compared to Gyllenhaal's spray-on sweat and crocodile tears as he shouts belligerently and pounds on glass windows. There's nothing that quite lowers one's estimation of an actor than to see him do so much more poorly in the same role performed by another just a couple years ago. Ditto the other filmmakers. At least Washington seemed to realize what he got himself into with with Fuqua in "Training Day" (2001) and "The Equalizer" (2014) and so turned up the acting even more over-the-top than usual to deliver us a bounty of ham.
I would think that an easy bar for whether a remake should exist would be that it improves on or differs from the original in at least one interesting way. Yet, this one is nonetheless guilty of failing that test. Oh well, at least it got me to watch the Danish original.