The Guilty is director Antoine Fuqua's third foray into the, so to speak, internal affairs of the Los Angeles Police Department, and while it doesn't quite reach the same level of virtuosity as Training Day (or, for that matter, Brooklyn's Finest), it stands as irrefutable proof that the crime thriller is the one genre that Fuqua can always fall back on (case in point, The Guilty is Fuqua’s follow-up to the dismal Infinite).

Unlike its spiritual predecessors, The Guilty avoids the city mean streets — which is not to say that what happens in them doesn’t affect the plot —, unfolding exclusively, at least the part that we see, in an emergency call center.

Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), a police officer demoted to emergency 911 operator, receives a call from a young woman named Emily Lighton (Riley Keough) who is unable to speak freely; Joe deduces that she has been kidnapped and is in a moving car with her kidnapper.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is; Godard said that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie, and this is, by design or accident, what The Guilty is vis-a-vis The Call (starring Abigail Breslin as the kidnapped girl and Halle Berry as the 911 operator).

Fuqua handles this material with nuance and ambiguity. Both Joe and and the audience are only aware of half the story occurring on the other end of the line; he, however, fully trusts his instinct — and our instinct tells us to trust his, too, despite, and perhaps even because of his erratic behavior. That said, if Joe's instincts were infallible, he wouldn't be stuck in a Rescue 911 episode right now.

All things considered, The Guilty passes the Donald Rumsfeld test; we have known knows (things we know we know), known unknowns (we know that there are things we do not know), and unknown unknowns (things we don't know we don't know). It's worth sticking around to find out what’s in the latter two categories.