“There are 188 million 911 calls a year. This one made it personal.” That’s the tagline and general conceit behind The Call, an initially taut but ultimately rather daft thriller starring Halle Berry as an emergency operator who has to use her phone skills to help find a teenage girl who has been kidnapped.
It starts off with Berry’s character, a previously calm and expert operator shaken by a mistake she made that led to a mysterious intruder killing a young girl. Cut to a few months later and she is now spending time training new operators as opposed to being one herself. One morning she is called back into the thick of it when she takes a call from a teenage girl (Abigail Breslin) who has been kidnapped by the same man from her past.
You may recall a ridiculous film from almost a decade ago called Cellular in which Chris Evans is stuck on the phone with a hysterical Kim Basinger who has apparently been kidnapped by Jason Statham playing against type as a bad guy. That movie was beyond silly but somewhat fun with it. The Call is playing around in similar territory in so far as most of the movie switches back and forth between watching Berry looking panicked while speaking into a headset and staring at maps on computer monitors and shots of Abigail’s Breslin’s frightened hostage in the back of the kidnapper’s car.
Unfortunately once it enters full on B-movie schlock territory, complete with bouts of surprisingly graphic violence and a villain straight out of The Big Book of Movie Psycho Clichés, it stops being the enjoyable nail-biter it initially was and just becomes inane. The kidnapping plot becomes more ridiculous and plot hole-ridden as it goes on, gradually draining the film of all tension like a car with a hole in its petrol tank. There are far too many plot turns that rely on coincidence that gives the killer a preposterous sense of elusiveness. Much of it feels so dated as to make the whole thing feel like it’s stuck in the ‘90s without the sense of knowing wit to make it a throwback.
Convincing performances from Berry and Breslin give the proceedings some weight and director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian) manages to build some really effective tension in the first half or so with some edge to the violence you don’t normally find in these sorts of movies. But it ultimately buckles under the weight of its own ridiculousness with a thoroughly misjudged third act that takes its stupidity to a whole new level.
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The Call is released in UK cinemas on September 20th.
