Watch This With Rick Ramos

When a Promise Meant Something: Sean Penn's The Pledge  November is the month of Rick Ramos and this week we continue - following Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and Walter Hill's Hard Times - with a look at Sean Penn's 2001 The Pledge. Featuring an underrated (and I would argue tragically underseen) Jack Nicholson performance that sidesteps all of the Nicholson tropes that we have become used to, Nicholson portrays Jerry Black, a police detective on the eve of his retirement who leaves his retirement party to investigate a young girl's rape and murder. He is quickly sucked into the horror of the crime and finds himself obsessed with discovering the truth and bringing the killer to justice. Penn's film takes all of the labored and tired tropes that have become standard for the genre and manipulates them in ways that make for a fresh directorial take. Featuring an all-star cast (that never screams of stunt casting) including: Sam Shepard, Helen Mirren, Aaron Eckhart, Patricia Clarkson, Michael O'K