Don't get me wrong, this film was interesting, but Sean Penn's pacing is just soooooooo darn slow! And well, the ending is just plain depressing. Watch at your peril.

As a kid I remember watching the movie Es geschah am hellichten Tag / The bait (Ladislao Vajda, 1958) several times and it was an always exciting experience, no matter I already knew exactly what happend on it, who was the murderer and so on... Today I've seen Th Pledge on TV (did't even know a remake had been made of the great movie I enjoyed so much in my youth) and recognized the story at once but has really been annoying watching how can a great story can develope into such a boring movie. by the way: why does Penn need 2h 4m to tell it? Removing the useless footage this movie could have lasted little more than one hour, I think it's stupid Penn makes it longer than 2 hours!Also the end, completely different to the original story, is pretty stupid and disappointing. Awful movie...

Jack Nicholson is in one sense a throwback to the old time studio system of actors in like stars such as Cary Grant or James Cagney he's so identifiable, impersonators have made whole careers of doing Nicholson. But the usual Nicholson is not really present here. Director Sean Penn kept the usual Nicholson shtick carefully in check in The Pledge, but did get a great performance out of him as a cop who just can't let the job go. Happens in many jobs when you are conscientious and care about what you do.On the eve of his retirement Nicholson who is at his retirement dinner goes out with the rest of the detectives and uniforms on a crime scene of a brutal rape murder of a child. A mentally challenged Benicio Del Toro is arrested and a confession is wormed out of him. But rather than go through the system DelToro steals a cop's gun and it's suicide by cop. Nicholson isn't satisfied and he thinks he has found a pattern of a serial killer. He also befriends Patricia Clarkson who has a little girl of the same type as the one this serial killer is supposed to like. Clarkson is a good soul who has had it rough and she and Nicholson start developing a relationship which under normal circumstances might go somewhere. But even in retirement Nicholson is a cop first and foremost. That fact kills any chances he'll have of happiness and completion.Sean Penn assembled a good cast that gives great performances, especially those I've mentioned. No Nicholson shtick here like you find in such classics as Chinatown and A Few Good Men, but a really good acting job.

In fact the novella by the Swiss author Friedrich Duerrenmatt, to which this screenplay is pretty much true, I guess (I've only read the Wikipedia synopsis) is subtitled "Requiem for the Detective Novel," and moreover it has a framing device which clues in the reader right away that his/her expectations should be held on a tight leash. This movie lacks similar warning labels, a flaw for which I'm knocking off a star as it inevitably makes people mad and confused (see some other user reviews).Furthermore not everyone wants to spend two hours on an existential parable. I wasn't really prepared for it myself, and when it was over I had a period where I thought Sean Penn had played an irritating prank on me, sort of like someone who tells you a long involved joke with a really stupid punch line. But when I had thought about it a few minutes I developed a better appreciation of the philosophical issues that the movie was raising.To give you a sense of those issues: when Victor Frankl was in a Nazi death camp, he had written a philosophical manuscript, and another prisoner asked him what the point of this was, since they were probably all going to die there and the manuscript would be forgotten. Frankl replied, "What kind of value system would I have to have, if I let my actions depend on whether I was going to get killed by Nazis and whether anyone was going to read the manuscript?" I admit to being hazy on the details of this story, but I am confident that I am getting the general idea.This movie follows detective-story conventions up to a point, and the point comes about ten minutes before the end of the movie. (Expect bigger and bigger spoilers as this review progresses.)Jerry Black is on his last day as sheriff of Reno, Nevada, land of ice fishing, Norwegians and hockey fans (the screenplay was written for Minnesota) and is ready to retire and go down to Mexico and fish, when he sits in on the botched arrest and interrogation of a mentally challenged Indian charged with the murder of a little girl. His successor has gotten a confession and is happy with the result. Jerry, who has sworn on the cross to the girl's mother to catch the killer, doesn't get on his plane. He goes out and interviews some big stars in cameo roles, and works out that there is a serial pedophile murderer out there, and figures out pretty much where he must live and some other things about him.Nobody else is willing to get on the trail, so Jerry devotes his life to the pursuit; he buys a live-in gas station / store and starts watching for suspects. He meets a woman (Lori, played by Robin Wright) with an abusive husband and a daughter in the predator's target zone; they move in with him, and he starts using the daughter as bait. There is a disturbing parallel between the way he grooms the daughter for her role and the way the predator himself must operate. It's not that he doesn't care for the daughter - he does - but he is taking clearly unethical risks with her, without cluing in the mother. In a usual movie, that would be enough of an issue. Also his obsession seems to be undermining his mental balance.Finally, after some red herrings, we get to the point (it is now fifteen minutes before the end of the movie) where the predator (identity unknown to Jerry) is expected to come for the girl. Jerry brings in his skeptical sheriff buddy with a SWAT team to surround the area, they wait, and -And the predator doesn't come. (Because, as we know, but nobody else in the movie realizes, he has had a fatal auto accident on the way there.) Jerry now loses everything. His cop friends write him off as a "drunk and a clown." Lori hates him and leaves. So far as he knows he has completely failed; the killer is still out there; his mind goes; he is left drinking and mumbling to himself in the ruins of his life. THE END.You can see how existential this all is. You try to live your life, accomplish something, catch the killer, roll a rock up the hill like Sisyphus; you give everything; and then something absurd happens and everything gets taken away from you, leaving you without even the knowledge that you've accomplished anything (if you have). That's life. That's mortality. That's what Stoics would say we just have to accept. I actually pretty much appreciate the point. And it was all done very competently by the ensemble. So I'm very glad I saw it. But if I hadn't had a Wikipedia article on Duerrenmatt on hand, as well as some previous encounters with postwar existentialist European thought, boy, would I have been grumpy about the whole thing.