Starring: Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin and Morris Chestnut
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 94 mins. Reviewed in May 2013
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For the most part, this is quite an engrossing thriller. The two central characters are women and watching and experiencing their ordeals will probably be more intense for women in the audience rather than for men. While it is a police drama, the central character is employed for answering 911 calls, some of which are quite tough and harrowing for the operative, emotionally demanding and draining. The victim is a teenager abducted from a mall car park and subjected to violence and some mental and physical torture. In the US, it was released not long before the rescue of three women who had been abducted in their teens and held prisoner in a Cleveland house for ten years.
The film opens very interestingly with views of Los Angeles before going into the key room where the 911 calls are answered. It gives quite a picture of those staffing the phones, of what is required of them, skills in talking to upset callers, typing in information, enabling police to identify callers, bring up their photos as well as tracing car number plates and finding addresses and information as well as doing fingerprint checks.
The first episode has Jordan (Halle Berry) working with a young girl while an intruder is in the house. The case ultimately leads to failure when the mobile phone cuts out and Jordan makes a connection, the intruder still being in the house rather than outside which was presumed. This has quite an emotional effect on Jordan. She does get good support from other workers and her supervisor.
She becomes a trainer. But, while she is showing the interns around, another call comes in from another teenager (Abigail Breslin) and the core of the film is Jordan keeping Casey on line, advising her on how to knock out lights on the boot of the car where the abducter has put her, pour paint out the hole… But, she has a temporary mobile which can’t immediately be traced. And so, the search for the suspect involves police, some concerned citizens on the freeway and Jordan using her wits to encourage Casey to fight.
It is only gradually that we see the face and then the whole person of the abductor who then becomes more desperate and more impulsively violent.
When Jordan is told to stand down and rest, she doesn’t (of course) and then goes out in search of Casey. While mobile phones are key to the process, there are a few inconsistencies in their use – Jordan (of course) dropping it a crucial moment.
While the confrontation is tense and an exercise in using wits, it is the final key moment that jars. It is emotionally comprehensible, but morally…?
Strange how a final minute of a film can change a moral perspective and what has been a satisfying thriller leaves the audience cheering (when it shouldn’t) or aghast at the decision Jordan and Casey make.
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