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Known for his work on “Session 9,” “The Machinist,” and “Transsiberian,” Brad Anderson is an accomplished genre craftsman with an excellent sense of atmosphere. Anderson has also established a steadfast side career as a prolific television director, in addition to his work on feature films. Even Anderson’s lesser films, such as “Vanishing on 7th Street,” which is a sort of watered-down version of John Carpenter’s “It Follows,” have been well-received. “The Call,” his most recent film, is a sputtering B thriller with a neat hook but little personality, and unfortunately, that cannot be said about it.
Halle Berry plays an operator at a 911 call center in Los Angeles, and she is a huge hit with fans. Berry, who is dressed in a poodle wig and a polo shirt, spends the majority of the film seated behind a desk. Her world — or “the Hive,” as her coworkers refer to it — is compact and focused on her work. Even her boyfriend, a dashing Los Angeles Police Department officer (Morris Chestnut), is a fellow officer. A framed photo in her apartment, which can be seen briefly, suggests that she comes from a family of police officers.
‘The Call’ begins with a bird’s-eye view of the city, followed by a montage of operators fielding 911 calls — some of which are frivolous, others which are serious. Afterwards, the film — which, if nothing else, moves at a fast pace — begins setting up the plot immediately. A teenage girl calls to report a home invasion, and Berry answers the call, making a minor but critical mistake that leads to the girl’s kidnapping. Her body is discovered the following day in a shallow grave.
Berry’s coworkers don’t hold it against her for making the mistake, but she has decided to step down from answering calls in order to devote her time to training new operators. Approximately six months later, she’s leading a group of trainees on their first tour of the Hive when a phone call comes in from a teenage girl (Abigail Breslin) who has been abducted and locked in the trunk of a car is received. The operator who answers the phone doesn’t know what to do with the call, and veteran Berry reluctantly takes over the reins of the operation.
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After explaining that she has been kidnapped from a mall parking lot by an unknown man and that the trunk she is in contains a shovel, Breslin implies that her abductor intends to kill her and then bury her in the ground. There’s no way around the fact that the man who has kidnapped Breslin is the same man who abducted and murdered a teenage girl six months earlier.
As played by Michael Eklund, who is twitchy and hammy, he is your standard weirdo serial-killer type. he enjoys cheesy music (when Breslin awakens in his trunk, the song “Puttin’ on the Ritz” by Taco is blasting from the speakers). He’s a worrier who gets easily spooked. Considering the fact that he has an entire underground bunker dedicated to torturing blonde teenagers, he appears to be woefully underprepared.
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The mobile phone that Breslin is using to make the call is at the heart of the story’s premise. Due to the fact that it is one of those inexpensive, pay-per-use disposables, the call center is unable to track it down. Additionally, the car is in motion, and neither Breslin nor Berry can determine where she is. Technical impossibility aside (because disposable cellphones can be tracked), it makes for an interesting cat-and-mouse game: Breslin and Berry must work together to outwit the serial killer while remaining completely unaware of where he is and where he is headed.
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A little filmmaking imagination and a firm grasp of the fundamentals of form would be all that is required to pull off this conceit. Unfortunately, “The Call” lacks both of these elements. The majority of the film is uninteresting and flat in appearance. The endless shots that revolve around Berry at her desk as she yells and sobs into a headset become tedious after a while. Although the premise suggests claustrophobia — Berry is confined to her desk, and Breslin is confined to the trunk — “The Call” is far too spatially jumbled to be tense.
Thrillers aren’t created by themselves; it’s a genre in which a lack of style is synonymous with a lack of entertainment. Anderson attempts to spice things up with some flashy flourishes — freeze-frames, for example — but these serve no purpose other than to suggest that Anderson is overcomplicating a straightforward problem. ‘The Call’ is reminiscent of Joel Schumacher’s “Phone Booth,” which was released in 2002 and had a strong, straightforward premise that was ruined by poor execution (interestingly, Schumacher was originally slated to direct “The Call”). “Phone Booth,” on the other hand, was at least campy enough to be entertaining. With Eklund’s bug-eyed performance, “The Call” is able to achieve something akin to calculating psychopath and more freaked-out acid causality than it otherwise could have achieved.
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Contrary to popular belief, as the screenplay — written by Richard D’Ovidio, whose previous work included the Steven Seagal/DMX vehicle “Exit Wounds” (2001) — becomes more ridiculous, the film becomes better, or at the very least more confident. The final act of “The Call” finds the film betraying its own premise by having Berry venture outside of the Hive in order to locate Eklund’s hiding place and rescue Breslin. At this point, “The Call” devolves into a rape-revenge film in the style of a grindhouse film.
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To be honest, even by exploitation film standards, the conclusion is ridiculous and morally questionable. It does, however, provide Anderson with the opportunity to do what he does best: orchestrate dark, claustrophobic horror. “The Call” elevates itself above the level of hackwork in its final fifteen minutes or so. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go very far in the air.
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