The Guilty

On the up side, "The Guilty" offers deceit, infidelity, romance, rape, murder, family matters, and characters ranging from powerful and wealthy to scumbags and thugs all supported by an excellent cast. On the downside, this Simon Birch knock-off heaps coincidence upon coincidence as it weaves its very improbable story with characters behaving as necessary to make the convoluted plot work. In the final analysis, "The Guilty" makes the suspension of disbelief easy by slowly sucking the audience into its complex web of intrigue. An above average little flick good for 100 minutes of escapism with nary a dull moment.

This was a sleeper, a no-name movie that might have gone straight-to-video and was pretty good. It's one of these crime movies that doesn't have a lot of action yet keeps your interest all the way through.

Like a true film noir, none of the characters nor their morality in this are really good but what WAS good was a few things at the end of this story you rarely see in a Hollywood film.

Bill Pullman, Devon Sawa, Gabrielle Anwar, Angela Featherstone and Joanne Whalley (Kilmer) make for a diverse cast of actors. This is worth a look if you can find it anywhere but not that good to go searching for it.

It is funny how much Pullman and Sawa resemble each other, and that Pullman's character seems to feel it when they first meet. However...

Plot wise, it's a trash fire, but there is very solid acting here, and the directing may not quite be memorable, but it also is solid enough to make this a picture worth watching.

But it does require truly monumental stupidity for some of the "twists" to occur.

The actors do everything they can to pull together a script that has so many implausible coincidences to be ridiculous. Let's put all of that aside and just enjoy some of the excellent acting by Anwar and most of the supporting cast. Pullman is always solid. But what really ruins this film is the last 15 minutes where stupid goes to a whole new level just to reach the goal line set by whomever was rsponsible for the script.

and all things considered means that if you throw 6-7 idiotic characters in the movie and you have any kind of plot (someone said even a twist), you will get OK rental movie.

everyone in this movie does exactly opposite of what would make sense.