THRILLER; 1hr 34min
STARRING: Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin, Michael Eklund
Connected: Berry
To work the front line between life and death is to test yourself every day. Los Angeles 911 operator Jordan Turner (Berry) fails that supreme test — in her own eyes — when a critical situation throws her judgment off balance. Six months later, an unnerved Jordan is popping anxiety pills and has been reassigned to the relative safety of the training division. But not for long! She’s roped back into telephonic action after a teenage girl (Little Miss Sunshine ’s Breslin) is snatched in a shopping-centre car park by a frantic lunatic (Eklund, disturbingly believable) with a diabolical agenda.
Cutting between a gamely coping Jordan in the nerve centre and the hellish events in the getaway car, director Brad Anderson (The Machinist ) keeps the white-knuckle tension in the upper limits. Berry and Breslin do their substantial bit, running a nail-gnawing gamut of fraught to hysterical. The fishy ending is a hard act to swallow, but in its briskly creepy, button-pushing fashion, The Call does exactly what it sets out to do.
