Halle Berry stars as an operator at a 911 call center in Los Angeles. Dressed in a poodle wig and polo shirt, Berry spends most of the movie seated behind a desk. Her world — "the Hive," as her co-workers call it — is compact and work-centric. Even her boyfriend, a handsome LAPD officer (Morris Chestnut), is a colleague. A framed photo glimpsed briefly in her apartment suggests that she comes from a police family.
"The Call" opens with a bird's eye view of the city and a montage of operators answering 911 calls — some frivolous, some serious. Then the movie — which, if nothing else, is briskly-paced — gets right to setting up the plot. Berry answers a home invasion call from a teenage girl and makes a minor but critical mistake which leads to the girl's kidnapping. The next day, her body is found in a shallow grave.
Berry's colleagues don't fault her for the misstep, but she nonetheless resigns from answering calls to focus on training new operators. Six months later, she's leading a group of trainees through their first tour of the Hive when a call comes in from a teenage girl (Abigail Breslin) who has been abducted and locked in the trunk of a car. The operator who answers doesn't know how to handle the call and veteran Berry reluctantly takes over.
Breslin explains that she's been nabbed from a mall parking lot by an unknown man, and that the trunk she's in contains a shovel — suggesting that her abductor intends to kill and bury her. Of course, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the man who has kidnapped Breslin is the same one who abducted and killed the teenage girl six months earlier.
Played by a twitchy, hammy Michael Eklund, he's a stock weirdo serial-killer type. He likes cheesy music (when Breslin wakes up in his trunk, he's blasting Taco's "Puttin' on the Ritz"). He's panicky and easily spooked. For a guy who has a whole underground bunker devoted to torturing blonde teenagers, he seems very poorly prepared.
At the center of "The Call"'s premise is the mobile phone Breslin is calling from. It's one of those cheap, pay-as-you-go disposables, which means that the call center can't trace it. Also, the car is in motion; neither Breslin nor Berry can pinpoint her location. Technical impossibility aside (disposable cellphones are traceable), it makes for a cool cat-and-mouse premise: Breslin and Berry must conspire to outwit the serial killer without knowing exactly where he is or where he's headed.
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