Brad Anderson's rollercoaster ride is a lean, taut, brilliant B-movie
The Call is a welcome little late summer treat, a juiced-up B-movie kidnap thriller from regular Fringe director Brad Anderson, admirably succinct at 87 minutes, constructed around the conversations between an abducted girl (Abigail Breslin) and the responder (Halle Berry), who picks up when the girl calls 911 from the trunk of the kidnapper's car. It's a machine designed to thrill, please and satisfy; a one-sentence pitch – 911 responder breaks rule No 1, and gets emotionally involved – deftly realised, manipulative and clever enough to be irresistible. Add an ending that's midnight-black, morally, yet somehow just right, and it's the kind of throwaway thriller that could only be improved by seeing it in a nighttime drive-in with a date, some reefer and a fifth of Old Harper. Pure guilty pleasure.
The set-up is simple. Six months earlier, Berry botches a 911 call – promises her first abductee she'll get her home, then hears the kidnapper's voice, then the girl's dying screams. Cue nervous breakdown. Six months later, she's reduced to guiding tours around the facility, but sits in when a trainee proves too spooked by her latest call: another abductee, another blonde in peril, another chance for Halle. The movie's agonisingly exciting central 30 minutes are a crash course in how to keep an abductee calm and cunning, and all the best ways to escape (or not) from a car trunk, and how to let others know you're trapped inside one. At certain moments in the pursuit you start feeling for the poor kidnapper, as everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong. Luckily for the viewer, if not for Breslin, he's not so easily outsmarted.
The Call's screenplay is by Richard D'Ovidio and feels very much like a fourth instalment in Larry Cohen's "phone trilogy", three infernally propulsive high-concept thrillers based around phones and confinement: Phone Booth, Cellular and Messages Deleted. If you're going to make a decent B-thriller according to a well-worked formula, you're best off turning to the masters, and Cohen is certainly one of those. And high-concept? (Which of course, essentially means, Ramones-level lowbrow.) Yes, Cohen has high-concept down to a fine art. Try this: Wambaugh-like cop-novelist (Brian Dennehy) with writer's block meets psychopathic hitman (James Woods) with 30 years of stories to tell. All hail, John Flynn's Bestseller. Or: Help, my baby's a mailman-eating mini-monster! So is born It's Alive! Keep it simple, that's the first rule of B.
Anderson and D'Ovidio have at least imbibed these sturdy principles of pulse-racing film-making. Anyone who loves bubblegum confinement thrillers like Disturbia, or chicks-take-charge revengers such as Double Jeopardy, or just loves Halle Berry or Larry Cohen, you have been duly notified. Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.
The Call is a welcome little late summer treat, a juiced-up B-movie kidnap thriller from regular Fringe director Brad Anderson, admirably succinct at 87 minutes, constructed around the conversations between an abducted girl (Abigail Breslin) and the responder (Halle Berry), who picks up when the girl calls 911 from the trunk of the kidnapper's car. It's a machine designed to thrill, please and satisfy; a one-sentence pitch – 911 responder breaks rule No 1, and gets emotionally involved – deftly realised, manipulative and clever enough to be irresistible. Add an ending that's midnight-black, morally, yet somehow just right, and it's the kind of throwaway thriller that could only be improved by seeing it in a nighttime drive-in with a date, some reefer and a fifth of Old Harper. Pure guilty pleasure.
The set-up is simple. Six months earlier, Berry botches a 911 call – promises her first abductee she'll get her home, then hears the kidnapper's voice, then the girl's dying screams. Cue nervous breakdown. Six months later, she's reduced to guiding tours around the facility, but sits in when a trainee proves too spooked by her latest call: another abductee, another blonde in peril, another chance for Halle. The movie's agonisingly exciting central 30 minutes are a crash course in how to keep an abductee calm and cunning, and all the best ways to escape (or not) from a car trunk, and how to let others know you're trapped inside one. At certain moments in the pursuit you start feeling for the poor kidnapper, as everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong. Luckily for the viewer, if not for Breslin, he's not so easily outsmarted.
The Call's screenplay is by Richard D'Ovidio and feels very much like a fourth instalment in Larry Cohen's "phone trilogy", three infernally propulsive high-concept thrillers based around phones and confinement: Phone Booth, Cellular and Messages Deleted. If you're going to make a decent B-thriller according to a well-worked formula, you're best off turning to the masters, and Cohen is certainly one of those. And high-concept? (Which of course, essentially means, Ramones-level lowbrow.) Yes, Cohen has high-concept down to a fine art. Try this: Wambaugh-like cop-novelist (Brian Dennehy) with writer's block meets psychopathic hitman (James Woods) with 30 years of stories to tell. All hail, John Flynn's Bestseller. Or: Help, my baby's a mailman-eating mini-monster! So is born It's Alive! Keep it simple, that's the first rule of B.
Anderson and D'Ovidio have at least imbibed these sturdy principles of pulse-racing film-making. Anyone who loves bubblegum confinement thrillers like Disturbia, or chicks-take-charge revengers such as Double Jeopardy, or just loves Halle Berry or Larry Cohen, you have been duly notified. Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.