Shawn's One Missed Call Review

Shawn here. Well this is the moment you've all been eagerly anticipating, the first official review of a 2008 movie.

2008 Movie # 2 - One Missed Call

It's the first movie of 2008 and it's certainly not the best way to kick off the year or this quest as a whole. It wasn't an absolutely awful movie, but it was definitely a bad movie. I thought we were done with this whole remaking of japanese horror movies. I mean the Ring was good but has there been one good one since? Let's look at the list: The Ring 2, The Grudge, The Grudge 2, Dark Water, Pulse. I'm sure I'm missing quite a few in there too. I'll admit I have a slight soft spot for the first Grudge but the rest of those movies are simply bad. We still have the remake of the Eye to look forward to as well. One Missed Call can safely be added to the list of bad remakes. In fact I read that the director didn't watch the original movie and made sure the cast didn't as well. So what the fuck? Why remake something if you're not even familiar with the original source material?

So the plot is basically about a group of people who get a phone call from a dead person. They don't pick up but the dead person is thankfully polite enough to leave a message. When the message is played, that person hears his or her own death, as well as the exact date and time when it will happen. Now the main girl has to team up with a cop to find out what exactly is going on before her predicted death time rolls around.

The first thing I have to mention is the utter stupidity of the main characters. Granted it's a horror movie so that should be expected but I can almost always look past that. Here it was pissing me off to no end. To begin with, the first rational thought that should come to anyones mind in this situation is either don't listen to the message, or get rid of your phone all together. Eventually they do think of this but it comes way too late. I'll admit if you looked at your phone and saw that it was your dead friend calling you would be pretty damn tempted to answer just to see what the hell. But if you already knew that picking up the phone meant you would hear your death, you should probably just stay the hell away from it.

Let's get hypothetical for a second. Let's say you picked up the phone and you heard yourself on the other end saying "Yea well I figure I would just step out for a burger, maybe grab something to eat and then I was thinking...OH MY GOD!!" and then you're dead. Thats the kind of thing that sticks in your mind. So if a couple days later you found yourself saying those exact words you'd think around mid-sentence you would remember those are your pre-death words and be on your guard. That doesn't happen here. It never even occurs to people that they are saying the exact words they say in the death message at the exact same time the phone predicted they would die. It's not like they're unaware of the time. Every character looks at a clock right before their death. So what the fuck? I mean they're just making it easy.

The actors portraying these characters certainly didn't make it any better. Everyone looks completely bored and you can almost see some sadness in their eyes that this is the best material being offered to them. In fact, the two lead actors ,Ed Burns and Shannyn Sossamon, have each starred in a movie that I would consider one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Those would be Sound of Thunder for Burns and Undiscovered for Sossamon. At least One Missed Call is a very, very small step up in terms of quality. If this keeps up, by 2016 we should see a 6/10 quality film by them.

The only thing that kept me at least kind of interested in what was going on was the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, they would be able to provide a decent explanation as to why this is happening. They did not. It's a pretty generic answer with a few unneeded twists thrown in there just to play it safe. It sort of feels like they had the premise, loved it, but then late in the process realized they needed at least some sort of story to tie it all together. It feels very thrown together and reminds me of about 18 other movies.

That's kind of the problem with the movie. The whole thing has a familiar, boring feel to it. It offers nothing new, just kind of going through the motions until it's over. It never tries anything different or exciting and overall its existence just feels completely unneccessary. At least it does offer a few laughably bad moments, such as when a TV preacher attempts to exercise a cell phone. Overall, after the Eye let's hope it's the end of the japanese horror movies. Welcome to 2008, movies can really only go up from here...as long as you ignore In the Name of the King, First Sunday, Veggie Tales and Meet the Spartans. God I can't wait until February...

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