Starring: Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin, Michael Eklund
Jordan Turner (Berry) was highly skilled in her line of work, handling 911 emergency calls in a large control centre in Los Angeles until one day when receiving a call from a girl (Evie Thompson) who was then abducted and later found dead. Six months later, Jordan has stopped working calls because of trauma and is instead teaching new recruits. When a call comes in from Casey (Breslin) another girl who's been abducted and Jordan becomes determined to to help her.
The Call works on a fairly simple premise and builds upon that to make for a very tense. If somewhat imperfect, thriller. The environment in which this film takes place is a great locale from which to draw tension, with the film opening with a succession of distressed emergency calls and relies somewhat on strong acting to help pull this off, with Abigail Breslin (who emerged into the limelight as a young girl in Little Miss Sunshine (2006)) rising to the occasion. Halle Berry also works well, although her character's cool and collected approach kicks in too quickly when the main plot begins, pushing aside the more understandable nerves that could've built the suspense. There are some intriguing twists and turns, particularly involving the film's antagonist, played by Michael Eklund but towards the end, the film falls unnervingly too close towards a torture-porn horror movie (i.e: Saw (2005) or Hostel (2005)) but you'll almost certainly never hear Karma Chameleon by Culture Club the same way again. The film also has a rather disappointing conclusion that disappoints given the character development thus far. Yet for all its faults, The Call is delivered with enough skill to get the blood pulsing a bit faster.
Next time, a family moves from a rural part of the Philippines to Manila and to a life of crime in Metro Manila.
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