If you get a call from your future self before you’re going to the rental store and you leave yourself a message, more than likely you’ll be telling yourself to skip renting One Missed Call and save 90 minutes of your life.
One of Bethany’s (Shannyn Sossamon) friends gets a cell phone call. When they play back the message it’s dated two days in the future and the friend hears her own death. Sure enough the day and time arrives and the pal is killed. When the friend dies there’s an odd red object that pops out of their mouth.
Detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns) is investigating the death of his young sister and happens to pull the strange red object from his sister’s corpse’s mouth. Eventually Bethany and Jack find that they’re looking for the same supernatural force. Bethany gets a screaming message on her cell and she and Jack have to discover how to tame the evil spirit before she finds that her bill is due and her service terminated.
Terminated service might be the proper term in that the movie is pretty terrible. Shannyn Sossamon spends most of the film in what appears to be a catatonic state but maybe the script put her there.
Edward Burns needs to have a serious talk with his agent as to why he turned up in this mess.
The mess in question is a remake of a Japanese film that from the reviews I read of that film it sounds much more appealing. What’s hard to get past is that in the middle of the film there’s an exorcism of a cell phone. Laughable. Get thee behind me service provider.
What does make that scene especially ironic is that ex-Scientologist actor Jason Beghe, who has made news recently by doing expansive interviews knocking it, conducts the exorcism. At least that struck me as funny.
There are some names in the cast besides the two stars mentioned but they’re entirely wasted. Ray Wise plays the seemingly unscrupulous producer of the religious show the exorcism takes place on and Margaret Cho plays a fellow detective in Jack’s precinct. They’re barely in the film, especially Cho, and you might’ve had the opportunity to at least capitalize on their fame.
It makes me wonder if the film was severely edited before being released to the theaters. I believe that I’ve heard that this is the case, but am not sure.
One Missed Call is presented in 1080p anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. It’s very telling at what the studio thought of one of the first flops of 2008 since it doesn’t put a special feature on the disc.
I guess the picture looks great in high-def but the feature is such a wasted effort that you wonder why they even bothered in putting it out in high-def.
One Missed Call is one that you’ll be better off missing. The original sounds like it had some good moments in it, but the makers of this remake seem to have taken all the wrong moves and ends up with a stinker on their hands. Don’t answer the phone.
One Missed Call [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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