BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

Lawbolisted Powerful

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Somnath Bhattacharya I happened to stumble upon this unrecognized masterpiece. Very few movies have actually quite managed to delve into deep human psyche, this one's that. Sean 'Bond' Connery seems to have been possessed by his character. His character's mind shows just how dangerous is the human psyche, it makes you feel it's not you somehow it takes you over and you become someone else. l years of working on crime scenes with child rape and murder, Johnson(Character) has had enough and is done with when something even more heinous shows up. His mind has seemed to arouse his interests in doing the crime that he's been working on. That's how evil a human psyche can get. Those moments between him and the accused Baxter shows.Well, this should have been received well by fans. I'm surprised with the low votes and ratings. Such a realistic way of portraying stuff. THE OFFENCE will surely leave you shaken.

Scott LeBrun "The Offence" is a gripping psychological drama starring Sean Connery, who plays Detective Sergeant Johnson. Johnson gets into a lot of hot water when he goes overboard and beats the almighty hell out of a suspect, Kenneth Baxter (Ian Bannen). Baxter seems a likely candidate to be the monster responsible for a series of assaults on children. The film begins with the immediate aftermath of the beating, then details the events leading up to it. An interrogator, Cartwright (Trevor Howard), is called in to grill Connery and get him to explain himself.Written by John Hopkins, based on his play, this film does betray a certain staginess. It's also going to be too deliberately paced for some tastes. And, in the end, it wasn't hard for this viewer to guess where the story was going. But even taking those things into account, there's a palpable level of tension in "The Offence" right from the start. It also has a striking look, because, with few exceptions, director Sidney Lumet and cinematographer Gerry Fisher avoid strong primary colours.Where Lumet succeeds the most is in getting some exceptional performances out of his actors. In exchange for agreeing to reprise the role of James Bond (for "Diamonds are Forever"), Connery had insisted that he get to do two smaller budgeted projects of his own choosing. "The Offence" was one, and an adaptation of "Macbeth" was the other; however, the latter project never came to fruition because "The Offence" didn't fare too well at the box office, and Roman Polanski beat Connery to the punch with his own version of "Macbeth".Connery, who'd also shined for Lumet in "The Anderson Tapes", is mesmerizing here. He's matched by the equally powerful Howard, and the pathetic (yet also perceptive) Bannen. Praise also goes to Vivien Merchant, in the role of Johnsons' wife. Connery has scenes with all three where you can just get lost in the performances.Overall, an intense study of a forceful, angry character.Seven out of 10.

JasparLamarCrabb Sean Connery is a British police lieutenant with a major chip on his shoulder. After 20 years of working one sordid crime after another, he's beyond burnt out, he's a serious cup of coffee waiting to spill...and he does...during the interrogation of suspected child rapist Ian Bannen. Sidney Lumet directed this stagy production that gives Connery one of his best and least likely roles; he's a bad good guy. It's a great performance in a highly unheralded film. Connery's anger is palpable and the first-rate supporting cast includes Trevor Howard and Vivien Merchent (as Connery's exhausted wife). The fact that the movie is not particularly cinematic does not dull its power. The script is by John Hopkins, adapting his play "The Story of Yours."

billseper I've seen many movies that undertook the subject of evil. They come and they go year in and year out. Some do it reasonably well like Hitchcock's 1960 thriller, "Psycho", for instance. However, if anything, "Psycho" tried a little too hard to be frightening, so that, in the end we came away feeling that the subject was one of fear itself more than of the thing that made us fearful. Michael Powell also released "Peeping Tom" in 1960, a movie about a psychopathic photographer/cinematographer who kills women and films them as they're dying. "Peeping Tom" was certainly creepy and disturbing, but in all the wrong ways. The murderer was treated as a poor, misunderstood man whose upbringing molded him into the villain he became instead of recognizing and acknowledging the self-will that must always be involved in the transgressions of man. The treatment of evil in most other films is either too underplayed to make us think hard about what evil really is, or is a typical Saturday afternoon cinema thriller like "The Exorcist" and its myriad of clones which are generally steeped in outward physical manifestations that all too often seem more of an excuse for showing off their latest special effects arsenal than anything.There are few films which try to show us that "subtle suggestion" that evil plays within all mankind, that essence of a presence which can be felt in your marrow trying to work its way to the outward physical universe as though it's in need of a host to do any real damage to the world. (I'll never forget reading Charles Williams' book "Witchcraft" and his line about how demons "pine for matter", something which still chills me). 1972 brought us, however, what may be the two most notable and praiseworthy treatments of that subtle suggestion of evil within. One was "The Other" about a young boy who seems truly tormented by his own psychopathic inner twin (actually he had a real life twin who had died and which his mind has turned into an inward dwelling entity of destruction)."The Offence" is the other great film on the subject of evil from the same year. The offence mentioned in the title is that of child molestation. There is a molester loose who not only rapes little girls, he does his best to make it hurt, to make them feel some of his own anguish for childhood traumas inflicted on him early in life. But we'll find nothing of "Peeping Tom" and its misplaced sympathy for the villain. Sean Connery is a police officer/detective who, by God, will have none of that! However, the movie takes a very strange turn during the interrogation, and during the second half of the film we get a real honest to goodness glimpse of what God must have meant when he said to Cain just before he killed Abel, "…sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." Let me also echo what many film critics have said before me: Anyone who claims Sean Connery can't act hasn't seen this film! He is nothing short of brilliant in this movie. Having said that however, Ian Bannen very nearly steals the show with his performance as the suspected villain. I can't recommend this one enough.