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Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Call (C)

Right up until the last fifteen minutes or so, The Call is a cool, plausible thriller with a Hitchcock-esque tone. It isn’t amazing or profound or even particularly original, but it was entertaining, engrossing, and believable. This makes it particularly frustrating that the filmmakers throw it all away with a ludicrous, semi-comedic, exploitative, and incredibly stupid final act. If the whole film was trash it would almost be better: Unfortunately, it started out pretty well.
Jordan, the protagonist, is a 30-something 911 operator who receives a call from a teen girl (Evie Thompson) saying someone is breaking into her house. When the phone gets disconnected, Jordan foolishly calls back. The rings alert the prowler (Michael Eklund) as to the girl’s location. He turns out to be a serial killer, so things don’t end well. Jordan is racked with guilt, but gets a shot at redemption when six months later the station she works at gets another call from another teen girl kidnapped by the same killer. This girl, named Casey, is in the trunk of a car and is using a disposable phone, so finding her will be no easy task.
Unlike most low-budget thrillers (and this movie is distinctly low-budget), the picture cast big name stars. Casey is played by former child star Abigail Breslin and Jordan is played by Academy Award-winner Halle Berry (Catwoman, Dark Tide, Movie 43). At no point is their acting outright bad, but it is never noteworthy. The movie would have been just as good if they had cast unknowns.
The Machinist director Brad Anderson helms the picture. The most notable credit among the three-man writing team is a script outline on the Bruce Willis bomb Perfect Stranger. Still, little past box office success doesn’t necessarily mean poor writing. And for a while, The Call impresses. Jordan relays advice to Casey (kick out the tail light; leave a paint trail) while a police helicopter and numerous cars search high and low for the missing girl. The killer avoids capture with a clever strategy known as “killing any and all witnesses.” There is no doubt that he will eventually be caught, but it is quite possible that won’t be until after Casey dies. Some of the dialogue is campy and there is no depth, but the film is still an engrossing game of cat-and-mouse, mostly because everything stays (mostly) believable.
Then we get to the final act, where everything falls apart. I’m not going to spoil anything, but I will say the picture throws out any notion of logic as a shirtless Casey (played by sixteen-year old Breslin) teams up with Jordan in a vicious battle against the killer, who has built an underground lair with electricity, multiple tanks full of chloroform, and working plumbing but never thought to buy a gun, taser, axe, knife, or anything else remotely useful in actual combat. Come on! The guy in Silence of the Lambs had a gun and night-vision goggles, and he was too dumb to put his weird dog on a leash.
The first part of The Call proves that the filmmakers had the ability to craft a well-structured, engrossing thriller. Couldn’t they do that for the whole movie?

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