The Call

Armed with a hoary yet effective setup, The Call is a perfectly watchable programmer that unfortunately descends into absolute tedium as it progresses – with the ludicrous twists in Richard D’Ovidio’s screenplay playing a significant role in the movie’s colossal downfall. The storyline, which follows Halle Berry’s 911 operator as she attempts to rescue a teenager (Abigail Breslin’s Casey) from a deranged madman (Michael Eklund’s Michael), has been suffused with elements of a decidedly familiar nature (eg the almost eye-rollingly conventional trajectory of Berry’s character), yet filmmaker Brad Anderson, despite a recurring reliance on needlessly shaky camerawork, infuses the proceedings with a palpably tense vibe that’s heightened by several gripping sequences (eg Casey’s ongoing efforts at escaping from Michael’s trunk). The Call‘s passable atmosphere persists right up until around the halfway mark, after which point the narrative takes a sharp left turn that is, to put it mildly, somewhat off-putting – as D’Ovidio slowly-but-surely jettisons the movie’s thriller attributes in favor of a slasher-like feel that becomes more and more oppressive as time progresses (ie too much of this stretch features Berry’s character stumbling and skulking through dark corridors). It’s an unpleasant and terminally stupid final stretch that confirms The Call‘s place as a misguided endeavor, and one can’t help but wonder just what drew Anderson, the filmmaker behind such superior genre entries as Session 9 and The Machinist, to this half-baked, amateurish material.

*1/2 out of ****