The Call (2013)

Director: Brad Anderson

Cast: Halle Berry, Evie Thompson, Abigail Breslin

Synopsis: When a veteran 911 operator takes a life-altering call from a teenage girl who has just been abducted, she realizes that she must confront a killer from her past in order to save the girl’s life.

A worryingly underweight Halle Berry (Executive Decision, The Rich Man’s Wife) plays Jordan Turner, a 911 call operator who has retreated from the front lines after inadvertently causing the death of a young girl who phoned for assistance when an intruder broke into her home.   Jordan no longer deals with the public, training new recruits to do the job which she feels incapable of doing instead.   But when a rookie operator gets into difficulties over a call from a girl who has been bundled into the boot of her abductor’s car, Jordan feels she has no option but to climb back on the saddle.

The Call begins strongly with a genuinely tense and suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse as Jordan talks the abducted girl through various manoeuvres intended to catch the attention of other motorists without coming to the attention of her abductor, but the movie inevitable has to widen its scope at some point, and as soon as it does the whole thing comes tumbling down.   Supposedly intelligent people do incredibly stupid things for no other reason than to artificially heighten the tension.   Trouble is, people doing stupid things tends to burst the bubble of suspense and, as everyone knows, you can’t put a burst bubble back together again.

(Reviewed 19th December 2015)