The Pledge is the third directorial effort from actor Sean Penn, after The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard. It comes from a novel by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt, which was previously filmed in 1958, a German film called It Happened In Broad Daylight, and also more recently for German TV under that name. In Penn’s film, the story is translated from 1950s Switzerland to contemporary America, but the plot hasn’t required any such shifting about. There seems to be something unfortunately universal about sex crimes.

Jerry Black is a police officer who’s about to retire. On his last day, he gets called to the scene of a rather gruesome murder where the victim is an 8-year-old child. He promises the parents he will find the person responsible; meanwhile the police capture a suspect, a mentally ill man who rather spectacularly commits suicide in the prison. It looks like an open and shut case but Black isn’t convinced, and despite his retirement he continues to investigate the affair in order to keep his promise.

This perhaps makes The Pledge sound like a regular crime thriller but it’s not really, it’s more of a study of one man’s obsession and how far will he go with it. The film starts out really well, the first third or so is really good, with those early scenes of the investigation and capture of the suspect. Unfortunately after that it starts to flag quite seriously as you begin to realise there’s actually not very much at all about to happen. The film frankly takes too long to do the little that it is, and gets progressively annoying as it tapers off.

Finally it comes to an ending which you will probably either love or hate, and I must say I fall into the latter camp. I won’t say what happens, of course, except that if you’re familiar with the book, the end of The Pledge is apparently rather closer to it than what the 1950s film was. We do find out who the real killer was, but the revelation simply comes upon us with no preparation, nor indeed any real rationale. I haven’t read the book so don’t know if it works better on the printed page, but I’ve never had an overly great tolerance for this sort of existentially absurd business, and it just brings the film to a conclusion which, for me, was entirely unsatisfactory. It may have seemed like a brilliant and profound statement in the late 1950s, but now it just looks like a damned cheat.

On the plus side, The Pledge features a very effective music score by Hans Zimmer, some extremely good widescreen cinematography by Chris Menges, and best of all, it’s brilliantly acted. Penn has assembled a really good cast with some great performers in small roles, and an excellent central performance by Jack Nicholson as Jerry Black. There’s a scene at the start of the film where he looks at some old photos of himself as a young officer, then the camera cuts back to him, and he just radiates this sense of world-weariness and being aged by his work.

So on the whole, I’d have to chalk The Pledge up as something of a disappointment, I really expected rather more from this film than what it gave us. See it for the great performances, but be prepared for a story and most of all an ending which will most likely just infuriate you.