The Call

Anticipation
You'd have a fair idea just how this film would transpire from beginning to the end no thanks to its verbatim approach adopted by the trailer, which does the film no justice, leaking out every little detail, key scenes, and identifying all the major characters in the movie, giving away some supporting characters' demise as well. So what's left in the movie that would make anyone want to sit through and watch it?

Maybe it's the performances of its Academy Award winner and nominee in Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin, which the trailer also never fail to remind you of their acting pedigree, as if hinging on their past successes in order to guarantee this one. But even their experience alone can't salvage Richard D'Ovidio's story, which is kept simple, despite having an interesting premise to work on, in the centralized control centre of all 911 emergency calls in Los Angeles. It was worked well into the story as a prologue with Berry's Jordan Turner playing an emergency phone responder, and having things go down south when she's distracted and not composed in her role, causing the death of her caller (no worries, this already covered in trailer territory).

Now months later, she's no longer in the frontlines, but adopted the trainer role in induct new joiners to the occupation, explaining the job hazards and providing a lot more detail that serve as interesting nuggets of information to the audience, but little else, before the serial killer (Michael Eklund) strikes again, this time abducting Casey Welson (Breslin) from a mall's parking lot, before putting her in the boot and driving off. A cat and mouse game ensues, with Casey having in possession a pre-paid cellphone, can only feed off to the cops some bits and pieces of information, while the killer continues to violently thwart every obstacle put in his way.

There are little thrills and spills in the narrative no thanks to the trailer for just about leaking the entire story in under 3 minutes. It did however, keep the motivations of the killer at bay, although what's being revealed is neither shocking since it's somewhat expected. The kicker though, turned out to be the final few mintues, which plays completely out of character, yet in it because you know director Brad Anderson needed something more intelligent, and this was a random grasp amongst straws for anything that can be turned into a story about revenge and just desserts.