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Mar 20, 201367A pastiche of classic plot devices scrounged from "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," "The Conversation," "Blue Velvet," and dozens of other movies, the story often feels familiar, but director Anderson (The Machinist) has a such a flair for suspense that even the most jaded viewers will find themselves in a sweat.
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40The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.
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Mar 18, 201350A sputtering, so-so B thriller with a neat hook but very little personality.
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Mar 15, 201375Surprisingly good, and surprisingly gruesome, fun.
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40For 91 minutes of its briskly paced 94-minute running time, the film works as a tightly wound bit of pins-and-needles storytelling. Then, Anderson lets it all unravel in a three-minute stretch of cheap writing that not only betrays the characters he worked so hard to develop, but that also thumbs its nose at any audience members with a brain.
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38Labeling The Call as "relentlessly dumb" would be an overestimation of its intelligence. This is as brain-dead as a movie can be and it assumes the audience will have the I.Q. of a rutabaga.
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60No one’s winning any awards for The Call. But at least the award winners know how to make it worth our while.
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50For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.
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38I’ll say one thing for The Call: Its ending is actually a bit of a surprise. Just when you think it couldn’t get any stupider, pow! I’ll be damned, Hollywood, you still have the power to blindside.
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40It buzzes along for a while, the promising plot innovations inviting suspension of disbelief, before by-the-numbers implausibility, over-the-top valor and unsavory contrivances take over and the line goes dead.
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33An active affront to logic, placing us in a world we firmly know doesn’t exist.
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75The Call might not be a classic for the ages, but for a Friday night? For a movie to take people out of themselves? And to make them marvel at the viewing experience that just happened to them? This one is hard to beat.
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50The action starts with a bang, but deteriorates and grows more absurd as the story strays farther from the LAPD call center.
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90An effectively creepy thriller about a 911 operator and a young miss in peril, The Call is a model of low-budget filmmaking.
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45The shoddy attention to character, plausibility and detail is particularly surprising coming from Anderson, a director of smart indie thrillers like "The Machinist," "Session 9" and "Transsiberian." He's been a gifted filmmaker with a talent for creating chilling tension through meticulous control of just these elements.
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50The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.
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50You’ve seen pieces of this movie in “Psycho,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and 2004’s “Cellular.” Still, the early scenes in the Hive give The Call a needed novelty: It’s a workplace drama, and the work is responding to other people’s desperate worst-case scenarios.
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50All that unsavory business aside, the biggest problem with the third act is how the film discards the novelty of its own premise in order to bring its star into the action. When Berry trades her headset for a rock, it’s the bluntest metaphor imaginable for a film that’s completely lost its mind.
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38Brad Anderson's film is defined by an often frustrating combination of cleverness and stupidity.
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50Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as The Call does at almost precisely the one hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour, this is a riveting, by the book kidnapping.
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Mar 12, 201350There’s little to differentiate this high-pitched screamer from a particularly feverish “Law and Order” rerun.
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70The Call for the most part is a tense, extreme-jeopardy thriller that delivers the intended goods.