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.
The serious subject of child abduction and murder isn’t well served by the way Anderson’s film veers into a comic book / vigilante drama, ultimately making this a call worth missing.
Berry’s fine performance powers a gutsy, original thriller that keeps you on tenterhooks… until the dumbest finale in years makes you wish you hadn’t bothered.
The kind of clichéd nonsense so common in the mid-'90s, it's a throwback - and not necessarily in a good way.
We're suddenly in B-movie horror territory. Still, Berry and Breslin make a good women-in-peril double act.
A promising picture turns into gibberish. Shame.
Once Berry transforms herself from 911 operator to detective-crime-fighter (a first in the history of call centres, surely?), The Call goes wildly off message and deep into absurdity.
Hang up.
It’s only when The Call attempts to progress beyond the parameters it has set itself that things start to fall apart a little – although even then the ludicrous nature of the finale proves entertainingly loopy.
Although the climax has little credibility (there were a few audible groans in the audience), thematically it's completely on the money, proving that Clover's theories about empowering gender reversals in apparently sleazy movies are much more than phoney-baloney rhetoric.
General release. Check local listings for show times.