|
|
|
|
|
Why does Hollywood persist in re-making Japanese horror films? Movies such as Ju-On (remade as The Grudge) and the Ringu series (you guessed it, The Ring) were dynamic and original pieces of popular cinema. Why mess with them? Unfortunately, Hollywood appears to be under the impression that Americans cannot handle the sensory overload of both watching and reading a subtitled movie. Unfortunately, there may be some truth to this.
The premise of One Missed Call is simple: a group of chiseled and attractive college students receive voice mails (prefaced with a cloyingly distinctive ring tone), where they hear, from the future, the moment of their death. Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon), our heroine with a secret, gets suspicious when a number of her friends die in horribly tragic—and gore-less—circumstances after receiving one of the aforementioned calls. A suspicious, red hard candy is also found on each of the bodies. Enter detective Jack Andrews, played by Edward Burns. He, too, becomes suspicious that something is not quite right when his sister also dies in mysterious circumstances, complete with hard candy and a cell-phone. Beth and Jack team up to solve the mystery and enter a haunted world—with a cell phone.
A remake of Takaski Miike’s far superior Chakushin ari (2003), Eric Valette’s One Missed Call rambles along without any regard for character, tension, or atmosphere. Neither does the movie attempt to play to the tastes of the lowest common denominator horror fan: blood, gore, and nudity. This derivative piece of celluloid remains stuck in some kind of vacuous horror otherworld. It doesn’t help that the original had an R rating, which has been toned down to a more teen-friendly PG-13. It certainly feels some dumbing-down was involved in the adaptive process.
It’s also a sad state of affairs when scares come cheap: characters are subjected to falling dolls and sudden bumps into people they know—all of which turn out to be nothing more than bargain-basement shocks designed to scare the crap out of teenagers. The film is certainly over-compensating for its fatal flaw: it doesn’t make a bit of sense. Andrew Klavan’s screenplay spits out all the clichés, seeming to care little for the audience’s intelligence.
Some of the blame can be placed on Burns’s charisma-less performance (there’s not one spark of chemistry between the lead actors). The character is an emotion vacuum, sucking all and any energy from the screen. Sossamon is adequate as the final girl, but her revealed secret comes across as more anticlimax than heart-wrenching. We’re not given enough time to bond with these characters to make their plight engaging—and we just don’t care by the end. And while some of the imagery is haunting, and it works initially to chill, it ultimately goes nowhere as a plot device. Besides, we’ve seen it all before.
This is one call that should be missed. Come on...you knew that was coming.
|
|
|
|
