The trailer for The Call seems to promise one of the most suspenseful films of 2013. Well, there is definitely suspense, but it's more like teasing a toddler at times than leading on an audience of grown adults.
Jordan, played by Halle Berry, is a 911 operator who gets pulled from her relative safety as a trainer back into "the hive" of the operating floor after a new operator gets a call that is clearly over her head. Jordan's decision to move to training was made after a call goes tragically awry and leads to the murder of a teenage girl. The emotional trauma Jordan experiences clearly weighs on her throughout the film as she struggles to save the kidnapped Casey (Abigail Breslin) from a similar fate.
If it sounds like an episode of Criminal Minds, don't worry, it kinda feels like a really long one. Just without the benefit of Matthew Gray Gubler throwing out statistics at random intervals. Parts of The Call definitely dragged more than others, but some aspects of the characters needed to be established"”or so I thought. The kidnapper in the film definitely didn't break any new ground in terms of villainy; he's definitely your run-of-the-mill bad guy in film.
The performances from Berry and Breslin felt believable and true-to-form for both an operator and an abducted teen. The problem with The Call is two-fold: the writing in the beginning is a bit awkward and the last 20-ish minutes of the film are absolutely terrible. The interaction between Breslin and her friend in the mall is just awkward because it felt more like how adults think teenage girls interact with each other instead of how girls genuinely do. And the last 20 minutes... It went from a theater filled with people on the edge of their seats into a theater of people yelling at the characters on the screen and disagreeing with how it was going. The ending of The Call completely went against the characterizations the previous 70 minutes of the film had somewhat painstakingly established.
All told, The Call isn't going to win any awards, but it's also not a bottom-of-the-barrel film. Had the writing been better and the ending been different, it could have been great; instead, I left the theater with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
