Movie review: One Missed Call

by John P. Meyer

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You might want to turn off your cell phone. Forever.

One Missed Call, French director Eric Valette's first U.S.-produced movie, almost garnered one missed review thanks to the last-minute screening opportunity offered to local press. In my case this would have involved driving from Old Lake Highlands to far north Plano for a 10 p.m. Thursday (Jan. 3) sneak - roughly 12 hours before the show would begin playing to general admission audiences the next morning. I passed on that action.

But the movie gets its review anyway because - aside from the heavy-hitting high-critical-mass There Will Be Blood, which I'd screened previously - it's the only (new) game in town this weekend. I payed my admission and took in the 10:45 show at the Northpark AMC on Friday, sharing the theater with half a dozen other dubious but hopeful filmgoers.

There's nothing particularly remarkable about One Missed Call. It's a pure formula spook show of the Final Destination and Ring variety, in which attractive young people are menaced by prophecies of their own doom - a doom which proceeds to be inevitably carried out in various grisly ways. (Except in the case of the lead character, whose challenge is to solve the riddle at the heart of the supernatural circumstances and thereby defuse the ticking clock of her own mortality.)

The twist here is that the doomed ones each receive a voicemail from their future, consisting of a cryptic message followed by "AAAH!" or "AARGH!" or "CRAPOLA!", exclamations intended to convey that their mortal coils are in the process of being reluctantly shrugged off. As in all these sorts of impending inevitable death amorality tales, different marked characters attempt to remove themselves from Death's hit list in varying ways, providing the guts of the drama, so to speak.

Working in One Missed Call's favor is a workmanlike screenplay by talented scripter Andrew Klavan (who's also a talented thriller writer), sourcing a Japanese film from 2003 called Chakushin Ari. Also on the plus side are earnest performances from the leads.

Shannyn Sossamon (A Knight's Tale) plays Beth, the person who will see her calling circle winnowed down to a shrinking arc and finally to just a point (represented by herself), all the while trying to figure out what the odd experiences described by her soon-to-be-dead friends mean: experiences such as seeing dead people waiting for buses and observing far more millipedes squirming in and out of the skin of their close acquaintances than seems normal. And then there's that whole marble-in-the-dead-person's-mouth conundrum...

Riding shotgun as the obligatory willing-to-believe-this-hot-babe's-bullshit-story (because hey, why not?) cop is Edward Burns (The Groomsmen) as Jack. Like Woody Allen's character in Play It Again, Sam, Jack's not hung up on long-term commitments.

As for the horror stuff: it's acceptably scary, providing the requisite shocking glimpses of mangled walking dead and evil-visaged ghouls to make your date grab for your arm (or other proximate appendage) for its bolstering effect. (Or whatever.) There's a particularly creepy episode in the deserted, burned-out shell of a hospital that will have you wishing that Beth had simply phoned up the Ghost Hunters instead of venturing in there on her own. And there's an amusing sub-plot involving Ted Summers (the sneeringly sleazy Ray Wise), who produces a faith-based reality TV show and thinks this whole "I hear dead people - and they're me!" thing would make for cracker-jack prime-time television. (He's right.)

The fact that we think we've figured out the source of the curse from beyond the dead - and then it turns out that maybe we haven't quite - only leads to another fifteen minutes of film time which I'm not at all certain ends up being a good or useful thing, in terms of either entertainment value or advancing the cause of global peace. Decide for yourself, if you dare. (But you might want to turn off your cell phone first - and leave it off. Forever.)

O.K., Warner Bros., a word about the film poster design: ugh. On first glance it looks like some kind of happy ET character phoning home, giving an entirely incorrect impression about the film's content; and when you look closer and determine that the goggle-eyed smiley face is a composite of gape-jawed screams of terror, one is forced to wonder what sort of twisted marketing trolls they have in their Madison Avenue employ.

ANTI-VIKING PREJUDICE: "From now on I only go to parties where no one gets cremated." - Leann Cole (Azura Skye)

DON'T WE ALWAYS?: "Make sure Jesus is centered." - TV producer Ted Summers to camera crew

JUST DON'T ADD ME TO YOUR "FRIENDS AND FAMILY" LIST: "Maybe you could call me sometime." - Beth to Jack

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