Review of The Call (2013) by Jack F — 30 Oct 2013

"The Call" is one of those movies that begins by making you think you're about to watch some trash, then unexpectedly becomes a semi-plausible thriller, then reverts back to trash. But that's not necessarily a bad thing; as any fan of "Law Abiding Citizen" or "The Boondock Saints" can tell you, there's good trash and there's bad trash. "The Call," for the most part anyway, falls into the former category. The movie has more than a few shortcomings, but I was entertained enough that I was able to overlook them.

Halle Berry stars as Jordan, a 9-1-1 call operator based in Los Angeles. At the start of the movie, she receives a call from a terrified teenage girl, who tells her that someone is breaking into her house. Jordan immediately sends a police unit but remains on the line with the caller, and due to an innocent mistake on her part, the girl is found by the intruder and abducted. Jordan is devastated, and when the girl turns up dead a day later, she leaves her position as an operator.

I've often thought that this job had to be one of the harder occupations to endure. In some instances, the operator is literally listening to people dying, and in circumstances like the one Jordan went through, how does one not get emotionally affected by it? People tell her it's not her fault or that she needs to let it go, but that's easier said than done. Six months later, while Jordan is now working as an instructor for future operators, she stresses that it's of the utmost importance to remain detached. She preaches this with conviction, but we can see the pain in her eyes as she knows how hard this is to accomplish; she herself is still haunted by that call six months prior.

Naturally, Jordan finds herself back in the field when a rookie operator gets a frantic call from a girl named Casey (Abigail Breslin) and doesn't know what to do. Jordan takes over and learns that Casey has been kidnapped and is calling from the back of her kidnapper's trunk. (I'm sure you're probably wondering how on earth she managed to hang onto her cell phone, but this really isn't as contrived as you might think. Not really, anyway.) Jordan is now tasked with keeping Casey calm and trying to pinpoint her position so that the police can be deployed.

This is the best stretch of the movie. The opening abduction sequence is well-done, but it feels a bit rote. But once Casey and her kidnapping enter the picture, the energy picks up and keeps accelerating until it reaches break-neck speed. The suspense is palpable and, apart from a couple idiotic moves by some would-be Good Samaritans (par for the course, for this kind of fare), the proceedings are actually rather believable. There are echoes of films such as "Red Eye" (2005) and "P2" (2007) here, two other films in which I felt the endangered heroine acted intelligently and reasonably (for the most part) and didn't make idiotic choices simply to extend the movie's running time. There are also unmistakable parrallels to "Cellular" (2004), which also centered around a kidnapping and a phone call to a stranger. These two films would actually make for great companion pieces.

Then the third act comes around, and admittedly, this is where things get a little sticky. Plausibility begins to drop and absurdity begins to come in droves, and the movie loses some of the unrelenting pace it had established with Casey's introduction. Now it is true that this junction does offer a bit of insight into Casey's kidnapper (Michael Eklund), and I can certainly appreciate the movie's efforts to flesh him out. It would've been all too easy to simply leave him as a flat, one dimensional plot device, so props to the filmmakers for actually attempting to make him a character. But a lot of what goes down is, for lack of a better word, silly, and I didn't like the conclusion at all. I can understand why they ended it the way they did; clearly they were trying to elicit cheers from the audience (a la the exploding shark in "Jaws"), but it just didn't feel right to me, and I didn't believe the characters would act this way. There are other ways to get a response from the audience. This one just doesn't work.

Nevertheless, "The Call" makes for some fun, if not a tad preposterous, entertainment. The white-knuckled middle portion of the movie works so well that its third act problems aren't really deal-breakers to me. It certainly helps that Berry and Breslin give it their all, developing a rapport even though they're barely on screen together. As an Oscar winner and nominee, you could say they're slumming it in material such as this, but that's really okay. Berry previously did this with "Gothika (2003)," and I rather enjoyed that one too. Sometimes you're just in the mood for some good trash.