The Pledge
Directed by: Sean Penn
Written by: Friedrick Durrenmatt, Jerry Kromolowski, Mary Olson
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Benicio Del Toro, Robin Wright Penn

This movie is probably not what you think it is. On the surface, it seems like a fairly typical serial killer type movie. Jack Nicholson plays the role of Jerry Black, a detective who is on his last day of work before retiring from the police force. While at his own retirement party, he hears about a case that he finds compelling. Of course, he becomes obsessed, and cannot rest until he solves this one last case. Now, how many times have we heard that scenario before?

I certainly had my doubts from the outset. The whole thing just seemed too cliched to be enjoyable.The Pledge however, manages to be anything but predictable. In the final analysis, I have to say that this is both a good and bad thing.

The case that Jerry takes on is one in which a little girl has been mutilated and killed, but the movie focuses on the detective himself, rather than the killer or the process of finding the killer.Jerry grapples with his sanity as he becomes obsessed with this case – and we all know that there is no one better to walk that line between sanity and insanity than Jack Nicholson.

One interesting thing is that most of the characters in the movie are played by seemingly average people. There are no beautiful supermodels in this movie. Jack Nicholson’s love interest in the movie, played by Robin Wright Penn (Sean Penn’s wife), is definitely not made up to look like a bombshell. This gives the film a realistic feel.

Benicio Del Toro was the only other big name actor in the film that was immediately recognizable to me. (Man, how many movies has this guy been in this year?) Del Toro plays a creepy mentally handicapped indian who was convicted in the past for killing a young girl. For the most part he does a good job of playing what seems to be an odd role for him, but there were points when I thought he was overdoing it a little. Again, however, the movie does not spend much time with Del Toro’s character, and the focus comes squarely back to Detective Jerry Black.

The cinematography was really cool, with a lot of interesting shots and camera angles. I remember one shot in particular that I really liked was an overhead shot of Jack Nicholson’s character as walks through a doorway as he is leaving a store. There is also some really cool settings, such as the scene where Jerry must tell the parents of the girl that she has been murdered. The parents on a farm, and Jerry wades through a seemingly endless field of turkeys in order to talk with them.

The movie definitely has an artsy feel.I am not too familiar with Sean Penn’s other work, but it is evident that this is his style. He likes to take things slowly, and he likes to give the camera time to quietly scrutinize the characters and their surroundings.

This is all fine and dandy, but I think that in some ways people are giving Sean Penn a little too much credit. I mean, at what point does a movie stop being artistic and start being just plain boring? I have to say that at points the movie was too slow and was stretched out longer than it needed to be. When a movie is slow moving and reflective that’s one thing, but it seemed like this movie was slow moving without a purpose.

There are long stretches where we sit and watch and wait for something significant to happen only to be thwarted again and again by false alarms. This, combined with the general slowness, frustrated me at times as a viewer. In a way, I think Penn is trying to convey the frustration of Jack’s character, and also his slow spiral into insanity, but personally I just felt like it was just a little too slow.

The ending of the movie is rather interesting, and I will not give any of it away. I will say that it is something I did not expect, and this in itself is a good thing. Still, the ending felt somewhat unsatisfying, and I felt a twinge of desire for a tiny bit of predictability just to wrap things up. It made me feel like I invested a lot of time in the movie for nothing.

When it comes down to it, The Pledge is a really nice-looking film, and it has some really cool elements to it. On the other hand, it just didn’t really turn my crank. Some people will love it, some people will hate it, but I am sitting somewhere in the middle on this one. — Sean