The Pledge stars Jack Nicholson as Jerry Black, a cop who is about to retire but decides to take on one last-minute case. He leaves his own farewell party to begin the investigation into the brutal murder of an eight year old girl. He is assigned to inform the dead girls parents, and the girl's mother makes him swear on his soul's salvation that he will find the killer. An eyewitness identification leads to the arrest and subsequent suicide of a local man and the case is quickly closed. Jerry heads off for a well-earned fishing holiday, but the memory of the dead girl haunts him. He is convinced that the wrong man was arrested, and takes his pledge very seriously. He is not satisfied that he has kept his promise, and abandons his trip to head back to the office. His colleagues remind him that he's retired now, and worry that he might be cracking up, but this does not deter him from his mounting obsession. Jerry makes it his life's mission to keep his promise. He buys an old gas station so he can check up on the cars that go by, and he gets involved with a local woman who has an eight year old daughter whom he becomes obsessed about protecting. Or does he?
It took me a while to realise that he was in fact using this little girl as bait to catch the real murderer, but the scary thing is that I don't think he realised what he was doing. He genuinely seemed to care about the girl and her mother. Perhaps the film's most clever feature is the fact that we are only as aware of what's really going on as Jerry is himself. Throughout the whole film there is an undercurrent of something sinister, something very disturbing going on. Nicholson's performance as a man on the brink of insanity is astonishingly good. We watch as he hangs around the dead girl's school and approaches her friends. He himself could be perceived as a child molester if we didn't already know that he's supposed to be the good guy. The most disturbing thing, I think, is the fact that I understood why Jerry had this obsession. I understood his madness, and only after leaving the cinema did I realise how what he had done was wrong. The film is so powerful that it was able to make me feel just as obsessed with catching the murderer as Jerry was. Out of all the possible crimes in this world, the most evil in my opinion are those which destroy the innocence of childhood. This film is about one man's desperate attempt to lessen that evil, and in so doing he conjures up an evil of his own.
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