By Mal Vincent, The Virginian-Pilot, (Norfolk, VA)

“The Call” at issue is not a social call.

To the contrary, it involves a young girl who is locked in the trunk of a car after being assaulted and abducted by a killer. Her cellphone call to 911 is a frantic plea for help. We are with her – if not all the way through, then at least the first half of this film that features Halle Berry as the 911 operator trying to save the day.

“The Call” is an extreme-jeopardy thriller that holds its audience in a hypnotic degree of tension most of the way – up until the end when it sinks to the level of a TV movie.

We saw the right way to approach this caller-victim relationship in the 1965 film “The Slender Thread,” which starred Sidney Poitier as a crisis phone operator trying to prevent Anne Bancroft from committing suicide.

They didn’t have cellphones back then, but they did have writers who knew how to compose characters rather than stereotypes as well as producers who were willing to risk dialogue rather than mere jump-shocks.

Berry is known for making particularly bad role choices (“Catwoman,” “Gothika”) since winning her Oscar in 2002 for “Monster’s Ball.” Here, she is either super professional in her execution of her 911 job or super hysterical in her somewhat ludicrous turn toward vengeance.

Abigail Breslin, an Oscar nominee for playing the chubby child beauty contestant in “Little Miss Sunshine,” is confined to close-ups and jerky editing to suggest the claustrophobia of being trapped.

Berry’s initial instructions to the victim are both logical and methodical – kick out the tail lights, etc. – in a way that wins the audience over to believability. Soon enough, though, the plot holes grow large enough to drive the car through.

Why wouldn’t the villain search his victim to see if she had a cellphone? Why would he ignore her so completely, allowing her to noisily make calls and kick out lights?

There are hints that the writers wanted to cover themselves; for example, the villain found one cellphone on the victim and could have thought she wouldn’t have another. Be that as it may, these types of questions are ones that are required more of movie critics than of audiences. It’s likely the ticket buyers will go along for the harrowing ride.

There is no denying, though, that “The Call” sells out in its last reel. Shamelessly, the writer has Berry get in her car and travel, alone and without telling anyone, to the possible location of the missing girl and her abductor.

It’s on the level of the cheap slasher movies in which audiences yell to the heroine not to go upstairs alone. This movie had a chance to be better than that.

Write off “The Call” as a bad connection.

Mal Vincent, 757-446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com

”The Call”

Cast Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin

Director Brad Anderson

Screenplay Richard D’Ovidio

Music John Debney

MPAA rating R (violence)

Mal’s rating two and one-half stars 

Copyright © 2013 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.