Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 4, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
We’ve had the U.S. remake of Japan’s Ringu, American-made ripoffs of the remake of Ringu, and now we have One Missed Call, the Hollywood adaptation of a Takashi Miike film that—let’s face it, Miike fans—was itself a knockoff of Hideo Nakata’s Asian box-office smash. Familiarity may breed contempt, but in fact it’s hard to get too angry at One Missed Call; it’s not aggressively bad in the manner of, say, the Pulse redux, just lackadaisically generic from top to bottom, one more trudge through the same-old same-old scenario of a cheesed-off dead person using modern technology to visit death upon a series of innocent victims.
This particular vengeful spirit believes in variety, though, which is a nice way of saying that One Missed Call doesn’t follow any coherent rules for its murderous behavior. Sometimes it’s a physical presence that can grab or stab people; other times it’s an unseen presence that contrives Final Destination-style fatal accidents. It also likes to torment its human targets in advance by leaving the sounds of their deaths on their cell phones in advance of their actual demises. It’s a little more impatient than Ringu’s Sadako (and The Ring’s Samara), though; after watching her cursed videotape, you had a full week before you died, whereas these Missed Calls precede the killings by only a couple of days.
The deceased are all friends of college student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon), who cottons to what’s going on when she witnesses a couple of them getting croaked first-hand after they’ve told her about the scary messages. Barely changing expression even after about half her social circle has been exterminated, Beth tries to protect the latest recipient of a fateful voicemail, who’s named Taylor Anthony but is incongruously played by Hispanic actress Ana Claudia Talancón (so good in Alone With Her, and so disappointingly one-dimensional here). Beth decides, quite reasonably, that removing the batteries from their phones might ward off the nasty ghost, or as she puts it, “Any dead people try to call, we’re not here.” Taylor isn’t entirely convinced, though, and winds up accepting an offer from an opportunistic TV producer (Ray Wise, also wasted) to appear on a religious/paranormal reality program. This leads to an awkward setpiece in which director Eric Valette is clearly trying to shoot around the fact that what he’s filming is the exorcism of a cell phone.
Valette won copious praise for his French chiller Malefique, and the Americanized script for One Missed Call was written by acclaimed crime novelist Andrew Klavan. There are signs in the first reel that the movie is in good hands: A black-comic sight gag demonstrates a playfully macabre sense of humor, and the opening-credits montage suggests that the filmmakers might attempt a statement about how communications technology has taken over our lives. What follows, however, lacks both wit and sociological relevance, despite the introduction of child abuse as a motivating theme. Instead, Beth teams up with police detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns), whose sister was apparently the first in the chain of victims, to undertake a desultory investigation and attempt to stop the chain of fatalities.
Much has been made about how One Missed Call was compromised by the studio in the interest of winning a PG-13 rating, and one need look no further than that reality-show sequence—and its counterpart in the Japanese version—to see what’s missing. In Miike’s hands, the supernatural attack on the studio was an over-the-top highlight, but here, after some obligatory flashing lights and showers of sparks, the payoff is a fizzle in the dark. Similarly, the CGI-enhanced finale ends before it really has a chance to get started, trailing off as if admitting defeat.
It’s also tempting to point to the abbreviated running time (at 86 minutes, this Call is nearly half an hour shorter than Miike’s) and accuse the studio of slicing out character moments that might have added depth—but in truth, there are still long stretches without any scary stuff, and too much time spent with the pair of bland leads. Perhaps it’s because Klavan is a horror newcomer that his script rolls out a series of genre clichés as if they’re brand spanking fresh, but it’s a shame Valette apparently felt compelled to depict the increasingly silly developments with a straight face, punctuated by lots and lots of would-be startling moments accompanied by loud musical stingers. It’s certainly commendable when any filmmaker takes supernatural material seriously, but a touch of humorous abandon can only help when that material involves a deadly ghost that leaps between cell phones and leaves red hard candies in the corpses’ mouths.
