The only element this turkey
of a bomb of a debacle is missing is Lindsay Lohan. With her, it would have been historically
dreadful. Without her, it’s forgettably
bland and destined for the 3 for $10 bin at your local Wal-Mart about a year
from now.
Shannyn Sossamon stars as
Beth – a college psychology student whose friends are dying all around her
(maybe she should consider that a blessing when you meet the friends). One by one, her pals have been receiving
mysterious cell phone messages from the future indicating when they are going
to die and a sound clip of the death itself.
Then, the doomed start having hallucinations including creepy crawly
monsters and seeing dead people (and winning an Oscar for this movie). After his sister is found dead with a similar
cell phone message, detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns) joins forces with
Beth and they try to get to the bottom of it all.
Who or what is making these
sinister calls? Will the writer who
produced this script please stay on strike for a few more years?
You have to give director Eric
Valette credit for trying, but I have seen scarier ghosts and goblins on Scooby
Doo. He tries everything he can to make
One Missed Call a spooky movie from spotlighting a creepy kid to a strange ring
tone signaling delivery of the death message to giving us plenty of bumps and
strange noises in the dark, but none of it works because the material from
writer Andrew Klavan (based on the Japanese movie and novel, Chakushin ari) is
not smart enough to be campy and not scary enough to be frightening.
Instead of wondering what
would happen next or getting immersed in a mystery, the most fun I had during One Missed Call was rooting for the next person to die. You start hoping the girl with the big chest
and tiny acting ability (Ana Claudia Talancon) will get whacked as soon as she
walks on screen, or maybe the hipster doofus with a bad attitude (Johnny Lewis)
will be decapitated. You might as well
engage in that kind of diversion, since Klavan and Valette don’t strive
for wild and imaginative ways of offing each character.
They don’t even keep to
their own “logic” about how the doomed are attacked. At least a movie like Final Destination has a
framework and sticks to it, while making the whole exercise outrageous enough to
make us laugh in a macabre way. In One Missed Call, sometimes unseen demons cause the death, sometimes we don’t see
what it is because the death happens in the dark, and then in other instances,
people are killed without even getting the cell phone message! As
the movie spirals out of control, you
might find yourself not even caring if it ends logically, as long as it
ends (which it doesn't. I had my coat on and off about 3 times as
I thought the movie was about to give up, but kept going and going).
One Missed Call also feels
like the place where careers go to die, or maybe it is a make work program for
poor and hungry actors. Sossamon was the
It Girl of the moment for about 10 seconds back in 2001 when she starred in A
Knight’s Tale with Heath Ledger. He has
gone on to become an Oscar nominated actor and star of one of the biggest
superhero movies of 2008, while she is left to put in a performance so wooden
you worry she might catch on fire if she gets too close to an open flame. Long lost and forgotten Margaret Cho shows up
in a tiny role that makes you wonder if she has given up on her stand up comedy
career (although, you will laugh at her blustery detective turn in One Missed Call), while Burns, who
used to be an acclaimed indie director 10 years ago, keeps making bad B-movies
and laughing all the way home to his supermodel wife and a house nicer than any
hotel I will stay in this year.
One Missed Call becomes so
ludicrous rapper Ludacris ought to sue for defamation of the word.
0 Waffles
(Out of 4)
One
Missed Call is
rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violent terror, frightening
images, some sexual material and thematic elements.
Copyright
2008 - WaffleMovies.com
