I'm just going to go ahead and spoil the shit out of this movie, so if you actually have a hankering to watch this movie just stop reading now.
OK? Still onboard? Well, here we go: this movie actually was a remarkably pleasant surprise up until the very, very end. The story of a veteran 911 Dispatcher, Jordan played by Halle Berry who takes a call one night from a frantic teenage girl reporting a prowler in her house. Berry makes a convincing Dispatcher right from the get go, getting the girl upstairs, hopefully to find a safe place for her to hide. Unfortunately, the door to the room upstairs doesn't have a lock on it and Jordan takes a gamble, having the girl open the window and then hiding her under the bed in an attempt to fake out the prowler and buy some time for the responding units to get there. Then, Jordan makes a mistake. Everything seems to be going OK and the prowler is leaving and the girl hangs up. Jordan redials without thinking- and the ring gives the girl away and she's kidnapped and killed.
The call, obviously, traumatizes Jordan. Her cop boyfriend (Morris Chestnut) and co-workers are sympathetic but six months later, we find that she's shifted her focus off of the call floor to become a training officer for new Dispatchers. But, as it turns out- the killer is ready to strike again and when Casey Wellson (Abigail Breslin) gets kidnapped from a local mall and a young, rookie 911 operator panics and can't handle the call Jordan finds herself behind a console as the race to find Casey and catch the killer is on.
The vast majority of this movie is awesome. It's tense, pulse-pounding, thrillingly realistic and portrays a Dispatcher doing what they do best- using their resources to assist the police in catching the bad guy. She keeps Casey on the line, keeps her calm, rides out her 're-freak' moments and soon they've got a name on the killer, a description of the car and even though Casey is using a disposable trac phone and they can't get an exact trace they get a general location and even find a creepy cabin where the killer might do his killing and other creepy things but the trail goes cold and there's no sign of Casey.
Jordan is told that she's done a good job (which she did) and told to go home (which is also good advice) and get some rest. Instead, she spends hours and hours (funnily enough, late nights in the Los Angeles Comm center don't seem to involve that many people from what I could see.) listening to the tapes over and over again, trying to figure out what a strange background noise in the call is and then, then, the movie takes a massive crap and Jordan goes out to do some sleuthing of her own.
Oddly enough, I was OK with that part. I think there's a natural tendency in Dispatchers to want closure and to actually go and see some of the places they hear about on the phone to get a sense of the geography and internalize a picture of the place in their heads. Her going out there bends the narrative a bit but doesn't break it. When she finds a creepy bunker and drops her phone down the hole and then continues into the bunker instead of climbing a ladder back out and calling 911 then the narrative begins to break down. Of course, she frees Casey and defeats the serial killer and then the movie collapses into a gigantic pile of manure when she and Casey decide to chain him to a chair and leave him in his creepy bunker to die.
What's frustrating about this movie is that it was so, so close to being a tight, pulse-pounding thriller that might have actually been original and maybe even innovative- using a Dispatcher as the main protagonist and having her help solve a kidnapping without ever being in the same room as the person kidnapped. The Comm Center felt realistic, Halle Berry's character felt authentic as a Dispatcher and even the methods she uses to establish control over the call and help Casey ride out her 're-freak' moments all ring true. I did want to strangle the newbie that freaked out when she initially took the kidnapping call- I mean, calm down, take a breath and control the damn call already. But I suppose if she hadn't freaked out, then Halle Berry's character wouldn't have had a reason to take over the call for her- so I guess I'll let that one slide.
Overall: ** 1/2 out of **** I'm sorry, I just can't give this three stars. I wish I could and I hate seeing a movie take a gigantic dump into stupidity after being genuinely good for long stretches of time. It's heartening to see Dispatchers get some love from Hollywood though and from what I could see, they seemed to have done their homework about the job which I appreciate. Though I have to say, my job is interesting- but not 'get to stab creepy serial killers in the back and leave them to die in a bunker somewhere' interesting.
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