Movie Review: The Call

Director: Brad Anderson
MPAA Rating: R
Studio: WWE Studios
Stars:Halle Berry, Evie Thompson, Abigail Breslin

In the new B-movie thriller The Call, Halle Berry plays an L.A. 911 operator who, one harrowing day, intercepts a terrifying phone call during a serial killer’s home invasion of his latest victim. Six months later, our heroine still suffers from stress and, wouldn’t you know it, in comes another call from a terrified young woman (Abigail Breslin) who’s been kidnapped from a mall and stuck in a car trunk. It’s then when the reasonably absorbing, plausible scares go right off the rails. As staged by the certifiably talented director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian) from a script credited to Richard D’Ovidio (Exit Wounds), the movie switches to Hostel mode and Berry’s character becomes some kind of Dirty Harriet one-woman vigilante, making ridiculous, risky decisions as she tracks down the killer in his lair—something she does unarmed and with no backup. The last third of the movie is so Saw-level rancid that we advise you to just put The Call on “ignore.”