It makes me sad that these putrid technophobic Japanese horror remakes keep polluting our theaters. This year alone will see One Missed Call, The Eye, Shutter and Possession (and I presume others I've mercifully never heard of). By my count there have been two pretty good J-Horror remakes, The Ring and The Grudge, one made tolerable by good acting, Dark Water, and a whole bunch of trash, Pulse, The Grudge 2, The Ring 2 and pretty much every American rip-off of J-Horror style that isn't a pure remake among others. One Missed Call fits comfortably in the putrid category. I almost feel bad for Edward Burns, I'm not sure what happened to his career. He showed so much promise with a very strong performance in one of the best war films ever made, Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, but since then has made so many mediocre-to-awful movies that it boggles the mind. He isn't always awful, but he certainly doesn't do anything to elevate the projects. Shannyn Sossamon is a perfectly vanilla actress who isn't particularly talented, but at least doesn't seem to ever give truly terrible performances. There is a scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where the characters sit around a dinner table discussing Sarah Marshall's prior role in a horrible film remarkably similar to this one (about a cell phone that kills people who answer it), that scene perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the logic behind this one. Injections of child abuse flashbacks don't really serve to further the story or characters, merely prolonging and convoluding the experience (which is mercifully under 90 minures). I really can't recommend this. It does nothing well: it isn't scary, it isn't technically well made, the writing is awful, the acting mediocre and the plot predictable.
Overall Score: 3/10
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