The Call starts decent but goes downhill fast

Modern society is a funny thing. We rely on massive infrastructure to stay in comfort and security. The ubiquitous 911 phone number is known from a very young age, but it is rare that we think about the people behind the number. Of course, supporting emergency services requires a lot of resources, both highly trained workers, advanced technology, and the integration of police forces. We like to imagine that these people are almost like robots pretending to be human; efficient and able to solve our problems quickly, but without any real connection to us. But of course, as it turns out, they are not robots at all. This might come as quite a surprise.

The Call from WWE Studios and director Brad Anderson stars Halle Berry as Jordan, a 911 emergency operator, who is very skilled at her job. But when she makes a careless error one day and causes someone to get killed, she has to step back and out. So the predictable way this would go is with a classic redemption story, where Jordan has to come back and save the day in a parallel emergency situation. That is exactly what happens, but the twist is how. When young teenage girl Casey (Abigail Breslin) gets kidnapped and stuck in a car trunk with only an untraceable phone, Jordan must use every trick in the book and beyond to track down the girl. And she might not even succeed. So at first it’s an interesting mystery and thriller, with a claustrophobic and terrifying escalation of the crime, while Jordan and her policeman boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) do their best to find Casey. Jordan must somehow work from behind a phone again, hoping to make up for her past mistakes with an identical situation ending better. And the police must track down and find the kidnapper … right? Well, actually, no.

Once the first half of the movie with the car ride and excitement is over and things get worse, the movie becomes the most cliched horror-style plot imaginable. A sociopath with illogical psychoses and a bizarre backstory that doesn’t pay off at all. The creepy sexualization of sixteen year old Abigail Breslin to make the audience really get that the kidnapper is just awful. Like we didn’t already pick up on that. Although you might cheer at a few key moments, you’ll probably groan a lot more. The problem is that the movie was exciting, if predictable, and then it became eye-rollingly silly. Sure, there are one or two decently original-ish twists that aren’t bad, but it seems like someone just decided to change the script at the last minute to make it more “scary” or something. The classic (if admittedly unoriginal) redemptive story of Jordan making up for past mistakes is a decent one, if it ultimately just ends up odd. There are a few other little issues here and there. Sometimes the claustrophobic filming in the trunk gets a bit overdone, dampening the tension and horror.

Abigail Breslin and Halle Berry both do decent jobs here, although there’s a lot of terrified wailing from Abigail Breslin to be endured. The movie lacks real subtlety — everything hits you over the head with a hammer, making obvious foreshadowing and using incredibly simplistic thematic aesthetics (like an American flag at just the right moment). Michael Eklund as the kidnapper is fine, although his character is so oddly written, it’s hard to get a handle on it. In the end, the movie feels like it wanted to play with the lone hero searching for redemption idea in an original way, and it started out on the right track — too bad it went off the rails (sorry about that pun). Just like a lot of movies, it could’ve been better.