She has big hair and is at the top of her game in ‘the hive’ where all emergency calls for Los Angeles are dealt with. One night she takes a call from a girl experiencing a home invasion. Halle tries to keep her safe but makes a rookie mistake when she calls her back after being disconnected, alerting the bad guy to the victim’s location. Halle tries to talk him out of it but instead hears his soon to be catchphrase ‘It’s already done’.
Despite support from her bitch supervisor and her policeman boyfriend of ‘When the Bough Breaks’ Halle reacts badly and when we catch up with her 3 months later she has moved to a training role. She seems a bit full of herself to me, but is soon dragged back to the headset when a colleague can’t handle an abduction case and Halle takes it on. We have already seen the girl get abducted and she awakens in the boot of a car.
Strangely the bad guy never took his victim’s phone, but luckily for him the phone is a burner that can’t be traced. Halle talks her through a number of tricks that may help her be found or identify her location. The bad guy is very poor and keeps offering his troublesome charge last chances as she keeps messing up his beat up Toyota - at least that paint she dripped over it miraculously disappeared!
The villain upgrades his ride when he takes out do-gooder Christopher Molisanti off ‘The Sopranos’ - nice that he reformed ; too bad it didn’t work out well for him. Slowly the net starts to close in on the bad guy but Halle is told to go home. Fat chance, I’m the star! Halle manages to track the baddie to his underground Culture Club torture dungeon but we have a few reversals ahead of us before the credits roll and things are sorted out!
I didn’t expect much from this film due to its limited sounding premise but it was good fun and kept me interested to the end. The straightforward scenario was enlivened by lots of fast cuts and wrong foots with some innovative twists and surprises thrown in along side some hip graphics and split screens.
No nonsense Halle was good, especially when she cracked through her tough exterior to end up talking astrology and offering movie dates to her caller. Abigail Breslin was less convincing as the abductee and I couldn’t make out a lot of her dialogue through her emotional delivery. She did look fetching in her blue bra throughout act three however.
The bad guy wasn’t too menacing although they did try to give him some back-story to flesh his character out. As a serial abductor he wasn’t very good and I imagine in the real world he wouldn’t escape capture for five minutes.
The dungeon scenes went on a bit log and it beggared belief that Halle’s character would abide by horror movie convention and let her man up off the canvas twice. Stab him in the neck many times, don’t turn your back on him!
The final conclusion was plain daft and had more than a bit of ‘girl power’ about it. It’s not one to take too seriously but if you like a throwaway thriller with a few decent set pieces you could do worse than to answer ‘The Call’.
THE Tag Line : Take the Call 73%
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