The familiar serial-killer flick gets a welcome shakeup, smashing to smithereens the tired trope of woman-as-victim and offering a bracing new perspective on an oft-told tale.
I’m “biast” (con): the trailer looked dreadful
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Don’t make promises,” veteran Los Angeles emergency operator and instructor Jordan Turner (Halle Berry) dispassionately informs her class of newbies. It’s far too easy, as anyone can see, to get personally involved when scared people call you for help in their most desperate hour. But after one 911 (aka, in the UK, 999) call goes bad for Turner, she gets personally involved with another… though it would have been difficult to disconnect, emotionally or telephonically, with this one anyway: a teenaged girl has been kidnapped and is phoning from the trunk of her abductor’s car.
Cinema is rife with serial-killer films, but the standout joy of this one is how it smashes to smithereens the tired trope of woman-as-victim. While similar movies often take pleasure, and hope we will too, in the easily terrorized weakness of a “clever” madman’s targets, here we have feisty Abigail Breslin (New Year’s Eve, Rango) refusing to give in to her fate or give up trying to escape. Her Casey Welson is, despite her made-for-melodrama circumstances, one of the most realistic teen girls popular film has offered us in recent memory. (Canadian indie actor Michael Eklund [Errors of the Human Body, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus] is effectively creepy in what amounts to a smallish role as the kidnapper.) And Berry’s (Movie 43, Cloud Atlas) Turner is a model of consummate professionalism: cool, calm, and capable as she talks Casey through trying to determine where the moving car is, where it might be heading, and how to draw attention to herself in a way that might bring nearby help. These are smart, resourceful women who don’t need rescuing: they’ll rescue themselves, thank you very much.
It does all get rather preposterously silly in the end, but director Brad Anderson, taking a studio step up from his previous indie work, never loses the goodwill he gained early on by bringing the same fresh perspective to genre storytelling he utilized in his unsettling films The Machinist and Session 9. This is tense, effective popcorn pulp that doesn’t make you feel that you’ve seen this same story a hundred times before.
This review was originally written for Film4.com, and is reposted here now that that site is defunct.
Having seen the trailer and read other reviews, I’m still amazed that you found this worth watching — but the review makes sense. Which means I’m going to have to watch the thing for myself. See that, film companies?