"THE CALL" IS GENUINELY THRILLING

By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com

 

 

Talk about your cheap thrills. Buy a bargain priced ticket to see Halle Berry in “The Call” and you’ll get way more than your money’s worth. Berry may be looking rather anorexic in her jeans and work shirts but her performance as Jordan Turner, a Los Angeles 911 dispatcher, packs a mighty cinematic punch.

Consider this the break-through movie into mainstream success for indie darling Brad Anderson (“The Machinist,” “Transsiberian” and TV episodes of “Treme” and “The Wire”). Anderson keeps cranking the tension like a hyperkinetic piano tuner, pulling each string tighter than you expect.

That’s the thrilling part – there is no emotion so extreme it can’t be teased a little tighter. How does Anderson do it? Maybe 10 years from now college film class professors will know why “The Call” is such a blood pressure percolator.

But those of us who just want to be thrilled can kick back in a theater seat facing a giant screen with wraparound sound, our laps full of popcorn and sweet carbonation, to let our hearts race at redline speed into the unknown.

To this scenario we can add Casey Welson, the damsel in distress played by Abigail Breslin (all grown up since “Little Miss Sunshine”). As the helpless victim Casey spends most of the movie confined in tight places or strapped into even tighter ones, looking terrified. She does pretty good at that task, while waiting for Jordan the 911 operator to figure out a way to save her.

See…that’s the gimmick. Instead of waiting to be saved by a strong man, she waits to be saved by a strong woman.

Every hero needs a formidable villain and Michael Eklund plays Michael Foster, looking very suburban in the beginning, who becomes quite believably frayed and frantic as his frustration builds. That’s when we discover he is, on the surface, one of those polite and quiet fellows with a responsible family who spends his nights behind a locked door in his hobby room obsessing over his past.

The plot sketch sounds deceptively routine. Jordan gets a call from a teen girl being kidnapped, but the call is from one of those throw-away cell phones that can’t be traced. So we watch stressed out Jordan the 911 dispatcher is at one end of the call and frantic Casey at the other.

Most of the action is Michael torturing Casey in various ways while Jordan feels increasingly helpless. Everything kicks up several notches when Jordan finally does leave the 911 center to take matters into her own hands.