Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

vincentlynch-moonoi As I was watching this film, one of the things that kept crossing my mind was how very much alike, and how very much different Americans and Brits are. Had this been an exclusively American-made film, set in America, you would have a very different movie experience.I know Sidney Lumet is considered to be a great director, and there are a number of his films I've been impressed with. This is not one of them. I found it very disjointed. What is its focus? The search for a child molester? Well, sorta. Police brutality? Well, sorta. A cop having a nervous breakdown? Well, sorta. No direct focus with subplots...all thrown together. Even some of the scenes about 45 minutes into the film are a hodge podge that puzzle you more than they inform you.I think it's necessary to separate two issues here. One is the film, which I am not impressed with at all. The other is the performance by Sean Connery, which though distasteful is remarkable.Trevor Howard shows up an the detective superintendent investigating the murder by policeman Connery. His performance was okay, although usually I am more impressed by him. Vivien Merchant is decent as the wife. Ian Bannen has a gritty role as the possible child molester and victim of police brutality.Sorry to Lumet, but I give the film, overall a big thumbs down. But to Connery a big thumbs up.

nomorefog I believe that 'The Offence' is one of Sidney Lumet's crowning achievements. It lacks the theatricality of some of his other films that concern themselves with the human side of the justice system. People attempting to find out the difference between right and wrong within their own souls. These include Paul Newman's broken down lawyer in 'The Verdict'; Al Pacino's holier-than-thou whistle blower in 'Serpico; and Dan O'Herlihy, and his dreaming of matadors in 'FailSafe' amongst many others. The courts, police stations the streets, the jury rooms, are merely backdrops to the endless questioning which goes on in people's minds as to what they should or should not be doing with their lives, and whether this gives them the right to judge others. Sean Connery plays a cop on the edge. Nick Nolte, Harvery Keitel and Gene Hackman have also played renegade policemen and done so memorably, but without the luxury of being provided with a decent narrative, an authentic background and superior direction. If you associate Sean Connery merely with his James Bond films, 'The Offence' will come as a pleasant surprise. But if you are already a Connery fan, it will only reinforce what the rest of us have always believed: that Mr. Connery is a damn fine actor when he is given the chance . After twenty years on the force, Detective Sergeant Johnson is a shell of his former self. He appears to be going through the motions of living with a job that consumes him, and a life outside of work that he cannot grasp with any emotional meaning. His irrational and violent nature causes him to kill a suspect in a child murder case and whether the suspect ever committed the crime is never proved by the film's narrative, nor explained. The time jumps in the narrative are woven seamlessly into the film, and it takes a better critic than myself to explain what they are meant to achieve, since I found 'The Offence' so absorbing I wasn't taking much notice of them. To me, the 'not noticing' factor is the sign of a film that knows exactly what it wants to say and where it's going. 'The Offence' pulls no punches in respect to the state of mind of Johnson, the sterility of his job and the hopelessness of his marriage. Ian Bannen plays the suspect in a serious case of child abduction and murder. He is an unimpressive kind of character at first, but he manipulates Johnson into a situation that suggests maybe he has been the guilty party all along and that Johnson is perhaps doing him a favour . But that's only my interpretation and there are bound to be others. I confess to being a big fan of obscure titles, whether they have been directed by luminaries like Sidney Lumet, or by personages nobody has ever heard of. 'The Offence' deserves to be more widely known because it is superior in every department. Particularly it has a story that is difficult to forget, and a straightforward style which belies its appreciation of homo sapien's moral complexity, as well as its portrayal of an individual with the bravery (or is it insanity?) to confront his inner demons.

imdb_nospam I want the 2 hours of my life back :( This is a pretentious load of crap. I don't understand what all the other reviewers are talking about. Connery's "performance" consists of chewing on the furniture for most of the movie. The film makers seem to think that under-exposed film, bad lighting, and worse sound will make the movie seem deeper. The characters and motivations are totally contrived. Yuck.The film comes in two halves. The first half is a very boring and slow "who done it?" cops and robbers affair, trying to find who attacked some little children. But it is incredibly, painfully slow and tedious. It is not helped at all by the acid-trip habit of inserting random imagery of flowers into scenes that were otherwise intended to be tense.The second half is one of those pretentious dialogs where two characters talk at each other for an hour. This is the scene other reviewers rave about, and I totally don't get it. It is *awful*; Connery and the other guy are both horribly over-acting, and don't look like realistic characters at all. They look like awkward puppets acting out the tedious message of the film makers.Again, yuck. And I even *like* Connery. But this is almost as bad as Zardoz. Almost, because nothing could really be as bad as Zardoz :)

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU A small English film, well done and many other things, but the interest is not in the plot because we know from the very start who the rapist is. But the whole interest of the film is how the rapist does not know he is one, does not remember his crime and how his memory is going to come back little by little, though it will take him killing another – at least – man who managed to see through his official innocence. That shows how being a rapist is a very special crime. It is a secret crime that happens in the deepest depth of one's mind and of which the rapist himself is not conscious, though his subconscious, when it takes over to guide him through the crime, is extremely well organized and makes him do exactly what is necessary for him to succeed and to go through it without any problem or opposition. This subconscious is also strong enough to make him forget about the crime entirely so that he does not have to hide anything since he does not know any more, though he does not need his torch in the night to go back to the girl in the woods, and her reaction confirms in our eyes the fact he is the rapist even if he is trying to comfort her now. And yet that subconscious is trying to hide the tracks of the crime by looking for an easy scapegoat who would in a way or another accept, willy-nilly or unwillingly if necessary, to be the surrogate rapist. The transfer of another transfer, and that is the beginning of the fall of the rapist because he will become a criminal of his own. And we are set wondering how it is possible for a criminal of that type to mislead his surrounding co-workers or even relatives and acquaintances into believing he is an innocent good man. How can crime hide so well and so deep in a man's deeper layers of his personality? Apart from that tricky psychological side of the film, it is rather simple and uneventful. But just try to imagine how he is going to realize he is the rapist and how the people around him are going to realize he is the rapist. And we can only have a flitting picture of what he did to the various witnesses or people who are in his way to leveling the witnesses into the ground. Quite a bloody trail.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines