Director: Brad Anderson
Talent: Halle Berry, Evie Thompson, Abigail Breslin, Michael Eklund
Release Date: 20th September 2013
The Call, WWE Films’ latest (and, at the time of writing, most profitable) venture, was originally pitched as a TV series, and boy does it show. Mimicking police procedural heavy-hitters like SVU, The Call is immediate and snappy, never letting up or stopping to think too hard about what’s going on.
Jordan (Halle Berry) is a 9-1-1 call operator who suffers psychologically after one of her callers is murdered while on the line. She takes some time out and is then given a chance to redeem herself when a girl is abducted from a local shopping mall. The circumstances surrounding the kidnapping are similar to the fateful murder earlier in the film, and Jordan is hot on the case with her greatest asset: her ears.
(Funnily enough, The Call’s plot is very similar to an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in which the team use a cell phone to track an abducted girl locked in a moving a recreational vehicle.)
Jordan’s detective power (if she has one at all) is the ability to listen really, really hard. It’s a unique and almost subliminal sound that gives the killer away: a sound that would go unheard, and a mystery that would go unsolved, if Jordan wasn’t listening. It’s a device that we see now and then in police procedurals, and yes, it was also used in that Law and Order episode I mentioned.
When Jordan uncovers the serial killer’s lair one can’t help but think of Thomas Harris – of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs – in fact, Michael Eklund’s wound-up, jittery performance is planted somewhere between Buffalo Bill and The Tooth Fairy, right down to the collection of dresses and wigs. It’s a tried and tested formula, to be sure, but I bet you never saw Clarice Starling or Will Graham hit a serial killer over the head with a porcelain replica of his own head!
The Call is perhaps not as clever as the series and works it sets out to ape, however, it more than makes up for its lack of smarts with jump cuts, vamping and zany porcelain head shenanigans.
