The Pledge
This is almost a brilliant thriller, but the foreshadowing is disregarded, leading to absolutely no twists, just a tragic coincidence. Sean Penn is just weird, and obsessed with mentally ill people. You never go full retard.
Our protagonist is a bachelor detective, a regular married-to-the-job guy, his only hobby is going fishing. On the last day on the job before retirement, some kid is murdered in the sticks, so off he goes. The younger detective that will replace him agrees to play second fiddle one last time.
The local cops are idiots that don’t do anything right (the reverse Wind River), so they have to everything, including talking to the kid’s parents. They are all religious nuts, so the mother makes our protagonist pledge he will find the killer over a cross, over his salvation. Even though he is a heathen, he did promise.
After doing basically nothing the local cops didn’t do already, they bust prime suspect number one, some native American mental patient. The new detective pumps up his chest like Foghorn Leghorn and goes to town. After grilling the perp for a while, and giving him what appears to be a kind of handjob, the “Indian” “confesses”, but right then grabs the nearest gun and eats a bullet. Another solved case for the boys in blue, bag ‘em and tag ‘em.
Alas, our experienced protagonist doesn’t take that lying down. Unconvinced that a mental patient could have killed the kid, he begs for similar cases in the vicinity and takes a look around. After establishing a profile and doing some minor legwork, he “predicts” there’s a serial killer in the vicinity with a predilection for 10 years old blonde girls in red dresses.
He’s literally blown off by the cops, his former boss dismisses him and his replacement just begs him to stop and enjoy the retirement. Of course he doesn’t. After taking up chain smoking and while drinking plenty of hard liquor, he pull a massive long stakeout: moving to some bungalow nearby, buys a dinky gas station, and just wait for the suspect to show up. To keep the ruse going, he goes the extra mile and befriends the barlady/diner server, a divorced woman with a small child.
After said woman is beaten by the ex-husband, our protagonist takes them in and provides parental substitution for the “orphan” and emotional support for the young mother. That’s not counting the amount of fresh fish he brings in every day, that kitchen must stink like hell. This is like a side-quest for him, he’s gone deep undercover and remains fully paranoid for years, upgrading his relationship with the girls, always with an eye out for rapist killers.
The prime suspect he detects is some part-time reverend, whose mother makes all kinds of porcupine merchandise (even though those are clearly hedgehogs, make up your mind!). His paranoia intensifies, but it seems to be a red herring, even though he is played by the villain from RoboCop 2 and Synecdoche, New York. Turns out he’s just a Christian fundamentalist after all.
After establishing a rapport with the little girl, she mentions some Wizard wants to meet her in a nearby park, so he does the logical thing: secretly setup a sting operation with the final favour he can ask of his previous pals.
Turns out it’s a complete dud: no rapist killers show up, but the kid’s mother is summoned and goes off the handle, asking for explanation why her child is human bait to catch a rapist.
The girls definitively can handle themselves, but having that breakdown, he never recovers and turns into a lunatic in the gas pump, years from now, mumbling regrets to nobody. As the cops are leaving, we see a black car Crash into a log truck, burning up extremely well, so it seems his paranoia was well founded.
I really though the ending would cross into the majority of rapes, within the family home. I though our protagonist would be revealed as the killer. The foreshadow included a trip to the psychologist even, to talk about sleep treatments and how your husband doesn’t pay that. But it’s not THAT complex, the killer just died in the car crash on the way to the sting operation.
It’s weird enough for a director to cast his wife as some young woman with bad teeth, but make her fall for Nicholson, a guy 30 years older than her? Yikes. No wonder Robin Wright removed the “Penn” surname.
Also weird is what they keep saying are porcupines, when those are clearly hedgehogs. Those city slickers, freaking idiots.
This could be the missing Two Jakes sequel, the Chinatown trilogy finale. Fuggedaboutit, it’s the Reno outskirts.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.