‘The Call’
R, 94 minutes
By Christopher Lloyd
I’m not sure what’s harder to watch: a movie that starts out well and then flushes itself down the toilet, or a film that never had any idea how to be good in the first place.
The former tends to be more disappointing, since at least for a while it was on the right path. That’s the case with “The Call,” a tightly-coiled thriller that is really suspenseful through the first two acts and then rolls off a cliff during the last half-hour.
Halle Berry plays Jordan, a veteran 9-1-1 operator working at the Hive, the massive emergency response station that handles all of Los Angeles. Night after night she receives calls from people in distress. Sometimes it’s just a stumblebum blathering intoxicated come-ons.
But on one fateful night, Jordan receives the most harrowing call of her career – and she blows it. A serial killer brutally slays a young woman, and Jordan believes it’s her fault. Six months later she’s finally back on the job, and relives the same scenario again. This time, Jordan will do anything to save the girl’s life.
Things go great, until director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Richard D’Ovidio take a left turn into disaster. “The Call” makes the wrong one.
Movie: C