Jordan Turner (Halle Berry), the hottest 911
operator on the planet Earth, just got an emergency call from
a young lady about to suffer through a home invasion.
She does her thing, calms her down, guides her to safety… but
first she calls the LAPD. The LAPD is awful. Now I
don't live in the best neighborhood so I am kind of used to
the police taking three days to answer 911 calls, but I expect
more from the police when the problem is in a posh, suburban
neighborhood. Regardless, since the police took forever
to get to this house, and truth be told I don't think they
ever did show up, this girl gets taken, Jordan begs this
assailant to release her… but he does no such thing. A
few days later she's found all dead and stuff and Jordan
Turner is a mess… all because of … wait for it… 'The Call'.
A few months have passed and Jordon has semi recovered from
this incident, is off the call center floor and is now
training new inductees… but a call comes in. Some
lunatic has snatched a teenager from a mall parking lot but
fortunately for this girl she has a spare cell phone on
her. The agent who took the call didn't know what to do,
and reluctantly, Jordan took over. The young lady's name
is Casey (Abigail Breslin), she's in a trunk and she's
speeding down a freeway. What now?
Well, I don't know what other 911 operators would do in this
situation, but Jordan Turner is pretty awesome at her
job. So this young lady is in the trunk scared out her
mind, bleary from chloroform, but Jordan still manages to have
her to do some things from this trunk which should have
rescued her. But we've already determined that this
realities version of the LAPD is pretty lousy, including
Jordan's man Officer Paul (Morris Chestnut), so they aren't
able to track her down, despite the fact she's waving her arm
like a lunatic out the back of a bright red Camry on a crowded
freeway where everybody has a cellphone. It's just not
gonna happen.
Now Casey is causing this lunatic (Michael
Eklund) an awful lot of trouble, pretty much to the point he
probably should've killed her, dumped her out the Camry and
cut his losses, but The Crazy has a pretty good hold on this
one and he has mighty crazy plans for the girl.
Unfortunately for this lunatic, the web is closing in.
Not the web of the police or SWAT or the FBI… no sir, those
guys all suck at their jobs… but the web of 166cm and 100
pounds of caramel softness who has left the helpdesk and is
descending on this fool to rain hell. Trust me, the way
this shakes out, this lunatic would've been better off with
the police, FBI and SWAT.
As it turns out, director Brad Anderson's 'The Call' is a
surprisingly effective thriller. The film is plenty
intense, is filled with all kinds of elements that invites
audience participation… you know… yelling at the screen and
stuff which we kind of wish they wouldn't do in a crowded
theater. We also have a plucky damsel in distress, a
villain who is completely wacky and reprehensible and a
heroine who will go far above and beyond the call of duty to
seek justice. A quality thriller.
Now, of course, it's not a perfect thriller, not that such a
beast even exists in the long history of movies, but 'The
Call'…? You see, there are quite a few things in this
film that will challenge a watcher's ability to suspend
disbelief, but one of the things 'The Call' has working for it
from where I was sitting, is that I had just seen 'Olympus has
Fallen' the day before so by comparison 'The Call' was a
virtual bedrock of cinematic lucidity. But we have to
admit, the last ten minutes were a little ridiculous.
Okay, A lotta of ridiculous.
Truly, the cops were pathetic. If I were the LAPD I'd
start boycotting these movies or at the very least start
billyclubbing screenwriters, like in the glory years of the
LAPD. That kind of leads to the fact that our perp
wasn't presented as the most clever bulb in the box, as far as
movie serial killers go, which made the fact that they
couldn't find this guy running around town murdering cute
blondes even a little more vexing. And if I'm a tough
serial killer, and Halle Berry walks into my dorm of death,
unarmed with no cell phone to bring me to justice, I'm
thinking that's going to be a good serial killing day.
I'm winning that one every time.
But that's just nitpicking. The bottom line is that 'The
Call' was a solid, tense, gripping entertaining
thriller. Sure it pushed the suspension of belief factor
to the breaking point, but the good far outweighed the silly.
