Review on | Teen Ink

Review on

May 18, 2022
By ehibl1 SILVER, Sussex, Wisconsin
ehibl1 SILVER, Sussex, Wisconsin
5 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Halle Berry stars as a 911 operator based in Los Angeles in the Netflix movie “The Call”. I saw the trailer for this movie, and was very curious and was dying to watch it. The movie opens up the view of the city and a montage of a bunch of operators answering 911 calls, some senseless, others serious. All of a sudden the movie jumps straight to the plot with one phone call. Berry answers a home invasion call from a teenage girl, making a minor but critical mistake by continuing to talk on the phone, leading to the girl getting kidnapped. The following day, the girl's body is found in a shallow grave. 


Berry’s colleagues didn’t fault her for what had happened, but instead made her resign from answering the phone so she could focus on training new operators. Six months later while leading a new group of trainees, a call comes in from Casey, played by Abigail Breslin, who has been abducted and locked in the trunk of a car. Breslin explains that she has been taken from a mall parking lot by an unknown man, and that the trunk she is in contains a shovel, suggesting that her abductor intends to kill and bury her. 


Michael Eklund plays the stock weirdo, serial-killer type. He’s panicky and gets easily spooked, plays cheesy music to calm him down, and has a whole underground bunker dedicated to torturing blonde teenagers who looked like his sister, who had died years prior to cancer. With the call center not able to track the phone and Casey not knowing where she is, Berry and Breslin must work together to outsmart the abductor without knowing where he is or where he is headed. 


The first 45 minutes of the movie really had me hooked. I was intrigued, it was suspenseful and kept me involved. But As the movie got towards the end, it got very bland and almost like it was just thrown in out of nowhere. I think Halle Berry is a great actress and I love how she portrayed her character, but I feel like the movie changed the whole ending with her character, making it irrational. Berry is a big part in this movie and is important, but to make her, a 911 operator who answers phone calls, be the superhero who saves the girl and kidnaps the abductor, let alone all by herself is not realistic. It almost went from a perfectly good thriller to a cliche gore fest when the third act came on. It completely made no sense, erased all the previous characters and their development, and dragged on for way too long. 


The movie with no doubt wasted no time in starting off with a bang, with hardly a dull moment. As the movie came to an end, my feelings and perspective changed drastically. The ending made me want to stop the movie and not continue to the end. 


This movie is truly an intriguing, suspenseful thriller, but if a real police officer saw the ending of this movie, they would not believe it is possible themself. Overall I would still recommend this movie as it was enjoyable to watch and was intriguing, I just thought the ending was a little slow and lazy and made no sense.


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