“No One Should
Bother Answering The Calling”
By Jonas Schwartz
There’s a
marvelous Monty Python sketch where Eric Idle brings in the leaders of
Communism -- Lenin, Marx, Guevera and Tse-tung -- and instead of forging a
round-table of ideas to bounce around, he asks them inanely insipid trivia
questions about football teams and Eurovision winners. The banal thriller The
Calling reminds me of that skit, dragging such talent
as Oscar winners Susan Sarandon and Ellen Burstyn along with the venerable
Donald Sutherland for an uninspired thriller that would have sufficed on
Lifetime TV starring Heather Locklear, Marion Ross and Abe Vigoda (BTW, I would
TOTALLY watch THAT Lifetime movie).
Nothing ever happens in the small Canada town of Fort Dundas, except for
snow, drinking, and a little infidelity. Detective Hazel Micallef (Sarandon)
finds an elderly neighbor dead, her face in a silent scream. The next town over
another murder victim has a similar distorted face. Nine bodies fit the M.O.,
making it obvious to Hazel that she’s stumbled upon a serial killer. When
photos of the nine victims are arranged in an order, they reveal a major
clue towards the killer’s motives. Can Hazel stop the crimes from continuing
and is the killer actually an angel of mercy?
The Calling tries terribly
hard to be absorbing. The origins of the crime are novel and are rooted in
religious mysticism, but more clichés pile up
than dead bodies. The alcoholic but plucky detective, whose bosses
(wrong-headed authority) undermine at every
turn, puts her life and the life of her partners in jeopardy in desperation to
solve the crime. Organized religion, corrupt and misguided, is at the core of
the evil. Add in the dotting mother, the green junior detective who ignores
protocol and the protagonist’s haunted past and you have the Mad Libs of
scripts, just fill in the names, locations and maladies and film what transpires.
Novice director Jason
Stone shoots a script by newcomer Scott Abramovitch that is photographed by
episodic sitcom TV cinematographer David Robert Jones, which may be why
everything feels generic, like a student film, professionally done but with no
nuance. The camera angles, the lighting, the scope of the mis-en-scene have Television
flatness.
Is Sarandon good
as the lost, struggling for redemption, Hazel? She’s Susan Sarandon for
goodness sakes. She won an Oscar nomination for John Grisham’s ridiculous
thriller The Client!!?! Of course, she’s good. Her eyes widen when she
discovers the secret of the positioned face expressions; she displays a hunger for
both the truth and a drink at all times; she drinks like someone tolerant to
the ether, able to be a functioning but erratic drunk.
Regrettably, all her character development is wasted energy when the
story doesn’t entrance the audience.
Burstyn is good
as always playing Hazel’s mom but she’s auxiliary to the plot. Sutherland has
two scenes and he has little in which to sink his teeth. Christopher Heyerdahl
(True
Blood) succeeds most as the killer (his identity is never a secret from
the beginning). Ominous and creepily pious, Heyerdahl makes
us empathize for his quest particularly because his passion seems so
earnest. As Hazel’s partners, Ally McBeal’s Gil Bellows and The 70’s Show’s Topher Grace give bland, almost somnambulistic, performances.
The shame is that
had Stone cast B actors, the expectations would have been realistic and one may
have cut the movie some slack. But when you bring such illustrious talent, you
want them encased in gold not gold-plating. The Calling will not
satisfy thriller fans, Sarandon fans or even fans of the Canadian landscape.
Now if only they’d start working on the Locklear version.
Jonas Schwartz is a voting member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics, and the West Coast Critic for TheaterMania. Check out his “Jonas at the Movies” reviews at Maryland Nightlife.
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