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| Rated: 3.00/5 | Votes: 2 | Views: 120 |Submitted: 01/06/08 |
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ONE MISSED CALL (2008)
If 2006's Pulse was the Asian horror remake boom's death rattle, then consider One Missed Call to be the equivalent of its postmortem twitching. Deceased since around the time The Grudge, this thinly-veiled grasp at recapturing those glory days when The Ring scared the shinola out of unsuspecting moviegoers comes across as more than a little pathetic. One Missed Call is only the first film of 2008, and already the rest of the year is boding about as well as Rosie O'Donnell on a tour of Willy Wonka's factory. A remake of Takashi Miike's genre ditty of the same name, One Missed Call takes place amongst a circle of friends undergoing a bizarre occurrence. After one of their group dies mysteriously, another one of them receives a missed call on their cell phones -- and not only is it from the future, it's of the receiver's voice, apparently at their moment of death. Psych student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon) dismisses it all as a strange coincidence, until more of her friends start to die under the same circumstances. Beth soon runs into Jack Andrews (Ed Burns), a cop whose sister's corpse was found to have contained the same ball of hard candy discovered with all victims of the cell phone curse. It's not long before the duo discovers that there's a pattern emerging, connecting all of those who've gotten that fateful call, leaving it up to them to put an end to the curse before they become its next targets. Despite being a master of ideal "WTF?" pictures like Audition and Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike's One Missed Call was surprisingly bland, as unextraordinary and by-the-books as horror movies can get. But whatever gruesomely entertaining moments the original flick did embrace have been juiced right out after its trip through the dreaded remake machine. One Missed Call is one of those movies that's a lazy sort of bad, giving you the sense that not only did the filmmakers know they had a crud sandwich on their hands, they couldn't care less and went ahead with filming anyway. The film generates a sort of malaise about itself, a lack of confidence in the material being the slightest bit exciting that translates into moviegoers becoming bored out of their skulls at an amazingly fast rate. Hardly any effort is put into revitalizing the derivative story, which was a ripoff of Ringu the first time around and comes across as even more unenergetic for the second go-around. The scares might have been effective, were the audience not distracted by both the shoddiest editing this side of a student film and terrible-looking, computer-generated ghouls popping up in the background. Once a deformed, CG baby holds out a cell phone in the same way Santa offers you a bottle of Coke, you'll know that One Missed Call has passed the point of achieving any sort of redemption. The story is a yawn-inducing excuse for a mystery, intriguing enough to at least keep you interested in what happens next but not quite enough to make you care. The acting actually isn't that bad, but the paper-thin script makes it hard for anyone to play anything else than potential ghost fodder. To give you an idea of how dispensable most of the cast members are, one actress still gets mentioned in the beginning credits sequence, despite being killed off mere moments beforehand, never to be seen again. Bona fide cutie pie Sossamon tries her best not to sleepwalk through her part as the obligatory Tortured Heroine (who actually remains incredibly mellow, despite her friends suffering one mysterious death after the other), but you can just see Ed Burns catching Zs by the truckload, his part one that the filmmakers probably included just so the running time wouldn't clock in at an hour's worth. 2008 is still young, with not just many bad movies yet to come but also more Asian horror remakes as well. Americanized versions of The Eye and Shutter have still yet to hit theaters and show horror fans if there's any true fear left to be mined in this sub-genre, but if One Missed Call is any indication, supplies ran out a long, long time ago. MY RATING: * 1/2 (out of ****) Reviewer: A.J. Hakari |
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