The Call
201395 minutes
Rated R
by Scott Mendelson
For the first hour or so of The Call, you'll think you're watching a new B-movie classic. The picture is staged as a typical 'special location' thriller. We get a solid prologue, a decent chunk of the movie set during the actual situation we paid to see, and then, as must always be a the case, a finale set away from the prime location. Speed had to eventually leave the bus, Shoot to Kill had to eventually get out of the mountains, and Red Eye couldn't just end on that plane. It's how a film like this handles the eventual disembarking that determines its overall success. Sadly, The Call blows the dismount by a considerable margin, trading plausible real-world tension for generic genre cliches. But up until that time, it is a superior thriller, and a successful return to the somewhat lost art of what Roger Ebert liked to call the bruised-forearm movie. For the first 2/3, The Call is a nearly perfect example of what it's trying to be.
