Critics reviews

It’s a disturbing movie — both in the grim, pervasive sense of menace it conjures and in its open-ended, existentially despairing finale, which of course satisfied nobody and ensured that the film would be a box-office afterthought.

What I like most about The Pledge, the third and best feature directed by Sean Penn — a somber character study featuring Jack Nicholson as a supposedly retired detective — isn't so much what it borrows from other movies as how nimbly it bounces its premises off them, confounding expectations by avoiding the usual thriller payoffs to arrive at a few uncomfortable conclusions about the leading character's blood lust as well as our own.