"What will it sound like when you die?" asks the tag-line for One Missed Call, a PG-13 remake of the 2003 Takashi Miike film (and an adaptation of the novel by Yasushi Akimoto).The answer: snoring...
Forget one missed call, this movie is one missed opportunity: a flat, formulaic cliche-fest that resurrects all the elements you've seen already in the other, seemingly-endless string of Japanese remakes (The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, and Pulse leap immediately to mind).
See if this premise sounds familiar: a little girl and mother with a tragic history are at the root of a supernatural mystery involving the "haunting" of cell phones in contemporary America. Everyone in a particular calling circle (in this case, attractive young adults of both sexes...) thus receive phone calls from the future, specifying the exact time and date of their horrible deaths. This voice mail also comes replete with a recording of what said death will sound like, not to mention a creepy ring-tone. And the ring-tone is truly creepy, I'll give the movie that...
Our heroine and final girl is Beth Raymond (fetching Shannyn Sossamon), a psych student conveniently studying the "the post-trauma child." She begins to lose several friends (including Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Azura Skye) to the killer from beyond the grave. Beth and police detective Jack Andrews (a slumming-it Edward Burns) must investigate the crimes fast because Beth has received one of the fateful voice mails herself, and will die in hours if the mystery is not solved. (Wait...wasn't that the climax of The Ring?)
As much as this movie bored me, I must admit that I truly dig the underlying theme behind many of these Japanese remakes. It's the idea (as I noted in my very first blog...) of the mass media or modern technology as bogeyman. Each of these films features a kind of "viral" murder campaign, one often (as in the case of The Ring, Pulse and One Missed Call) carried out under the auspices of our modern conveniences and tools, whether videotape, the Internet or cell phones. This is a terrific and unsettling concept because there's a deep underlying suspicion of these new technologies in our contemporary society. Just yesterday, for instance, a new study came out linking cell phones and cancer, so these Japanese films and their remakes are definitely tapping into a 21st century vibe of anxiety. The idea that you can catch something (like, say, apathy...) from modern mainstream entertainment or cable news is also a powerful one vetted by these films. You watch too long and you do die inside. I look forward to the inevitable horror film involving death by Internet social network: Face(book) of Death.
The problem with One Missed Call is that we've seen all these elements so many times now that there are no surprises. Familiarity breeds contempt, or at least, ennui. Technology pinpointing time of death? Check, seen it in The Ring. A loosely connected web of hot young victims loosely connected by their use of damaging technology? Check, seen it in Pulse. A mother-child evil dynamic? Check, seen it in The Ring and Dark Water. A curse that can't be stopped, and that even circles round for the final girl? Check, seen it in The Ring and The Grudge. A cop investigates? (The Grudge). A curse appears to have passed without the obligatory death, only to claim a different victim than you expected, one who happens to look like (or actually is) Edward Burns? (The Ring).
Without exaggeration, this movie doesn't serve up even one twist on this hackneyed material. If the characters proved especially interesting, or the horror especially egregious and graphic, the tired plot might pass muster. But the protagonists are off-the-shelf and the horror is restrained by the PG-13 rating. The fiilm is also short (87 minutes or so), and the editing appears botched -- like a lot of stuff was trimmed before release. For instance, the great Ray Wise shows up with important flourish in a dynamic supporting role (as a host of the reality series American Miracles) but then disappears from the film without a trace. Where did he go? Jason Beghe (Monkey Shines) also shows up as a charlatan exorcist, but his role is also strangely truncated, and his ultimate fate is not depicted or even commented on.
My biggest complaint with One Missed Call, however, is that the film does not play by any coherent set of rules. In the first scene, for instance, we witness a brutal supernatural attack on a lovely African-American woman near her back-yard fish pond. After she is drowned, an innocent bystander -- her cat -- is also attacked, choked and drowned in a punchy "sting-in-the-tail" moment. As we learn later in the film, however, the only people (or life forms, we presume....) who can be killed by the caller from beyond the grave are those who have received personal voice mails.
So how do you explain the cat's murder? Does it own a cell phone too? Did the feline receive a voice message saying it would be throttled to death at precisely 3:03 pm or some such thing? This is a moment that is staged and executed beautifully as a jolt-scare, but which - upon reflection - makes absolutely no sense and worse, violates all the rules the film attempts to lay down. The thing about these horror movies: they need to make narrative sense; they need to establish rules and stick to them, so that - as the audience - we understand who is in jeopardy, when they are in jeopardy and why they are in jeopardy. It is then necessary for the filmmaker to "play" with those rules to surprise us; but they can't break the rules all together, or it's just...chaos.
The end of the film, which appropriates the climax of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) by the way, is another astonishing rule breaker. The evil is vanquished, dragged back to Hell we presume, by the custodian that Beth has freed from an abandoned hospital (the child's mother...). In one shot, we see the ghostly maternal force ripping the evil tyke right out of our dimension. Wow! Almost the very next shot, however, is a close-up of a cell-phone dialing itself, indicating that the evil child is now seeking out a further victim. So which is it, movie? Is the evil gone? Or is the evil still on the loose? This is one of the most ham-handed and abrupt transitions from climax to sequel set-up I've seen in some time. This movie tries to have it both ways, and neither way works.
I don't want to give the impression that One Missed Call is the worst movie ever made or anything. It boasts a few authentic scares, particularly in the moments involving a surgical theatre and a vent shaft leading into a hospital basement (though even here, I was reminded of the superior Silent Hill). It's just that it's dull and lacking invention. There's absolutely no reason to see One Missed Call because the same type of story is more competently dramatized (in ascending order of their quality): Dark Water, Pulse, The Grudge and The Ring.
So see one of those instead and make this one missed movie.
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