One Missed Plot (One Missed Call [2008] (DVD))

Name: spencer_hawken

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Product:	One Missed Call [2008] (DVD)
Date:	13/05/08 (115 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It ends, rather quickly

Disadvantages: So predictable, so familiar

Ah the pain of having to endure yet another Japanese horror movie, remade by Americans for a global audience. Sadly American movie producers have not quite cottoned on that so many of these Japanese horror movies are pretty much the same. Now we have One Missed Call, a movie that not only bears a canny resemblance to The Ring, but also more home-grown American fare Final Destination.

Young (not so young) Beth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) grows increasing troubled when a series of her friends receive strange phone calls apparently from themselves. A few days after the said phone call the friends end up down the local morgue. In enters Jack Andrews played by the ultra cheesy Ed Burns, a cop who unlike everyone else seems to agree that Beth friends are being stalked by something from an unearthly dimension, primarily down to the fact that a relative of his too has been a victim, receiving a call from herself only to be dead 24 hours later.

As you might guess by my rather rushed synopsis I'm not going to be giving this movie any praise. Although I will say that the movie did offer a promising opening, despite the fact that I sat saying to myself "Oh this is like Final Destination!"

Where One Missed Call falls down is due to the fact that it's so repetitive, and similar to a variety of other movies that it's almost impossible to separate the movie from a variety of other bad franchises. The phone rings "Ding dingy ding ding!" in a sort of musical box style manner, and the phone call comes through. This happens again and again and again, with each phone call comes a prophetic addition a future date the call was made, which transpires to be the exact moment of death. Nobody ever notices one big thing though; if your phone rings you generally answer it because you know your own ringtone. Each time the phone call occurs in this movie the characters say "That's not my ringtone!" then fumble about in there bag, pocket, or on the bed. Now am I being daft but if it's not your ringtone, would you not automatically think it was the ringtone of an accompanying friend (around at the time of the call), if I hear a phone ring and it's not my ringtone I don't even bat an eyelid, these people all know regardless of the fact that the phone ring is different that the call is on their phone.

I know I'm being petty picking up on the smallest fault in a movie, so how about when Twin Peaks actor Ray Wise (lately of the smashing hit show Reaper), turns up as the character Ted Summers a TV exorcist who lost his child in a supernatural event. Having selected one of Beth's friends he decides to stage a live TV exorcism with her as his experiment, of course it all goes wrong and the unwilling applicant has a fate with death. After this Ted is just written off as a character (not through death), if he is such a rating chaser as the movie makes out surely he might be pursuing Beth to capture more of her friends deaths live on camera, think about the ratings.

The movie is as dreary as hell while Sossamon is relatively okay in a sort of b-list wooden way, although very nice to look at; Ed Burns, what the hell is that all about? Am I the only person that finds this actor/director (though not a director here) incredibly dull, ever since the movie The Brothers McMullan (remember that? Yes?? You sicko) this actor has been the proverbial thorn in my side. Someone somewhere decided that Burns is talented, and therefore sets him often as a romantic lead, I believe he has it in his contract "Female lead must be attracted to me" but why? Can you identify where his head ends and his body starts? There is certainly no neck anywhere about. To add to this the guy cannot really act, let alone run something he has to frequently do in this movie, it's rather like watching someone's granddad running down the road, kind of a walk run.

Sorry but One Missed Call is just diabolical, after a promising start it just gets blander and blander, you can't get involved with the cast because frankly you don't really like them. Ray Wise gets a slight tick because it's always nice to see the man I have come to know as Leland Palmer (Twin Peaks character) pop up in anything, but to be honest not even he scores high enough to pick the movie out of diabolical slime it has entered.

I know I have been overly personal about one of the actors specifically, but I really take terrible exception to both the movie, and one of its main cast. Maybe if the movie had been halfway decent I might have been a little less ferocious. Bottom line is no matter how tempted, try to resist.

I saw the movie at a screening, you can get the DVD from play.com should you be that way inclined.

Summary: Yet another Japanese movie remade by a major hollywood company