Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland
beige in the mostly straight-to-video “The Calling,” a piece that almost
miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan Sarandon,
Ellen Burstyn, and Donald Sutherland. A serial killer that isn’t interesting, a
flat attempt at procedural, all the atmosphere of an episode of a bad TV drama,
and nary a performance that the actor or actress would like you to remember
come tomorrow—“The Calling” is a depressingly bad movie, the kind of film that
leads to sympathy for those involved if you can get past the anger of having
wasted your time and money on it.
Detective Hazel Micallef (Susan Sarandon) barely polices the
sleepy town of Fort Dundas. The small Canadian burg doesn’t need much police
work and so the fact that the wickedness of age and alcoholism are eating away
at Hazel’s stamina doesn’t impact her day job much. Along with fellow small
town cop Ray Green (Gil Bellows), she can get the job done. In fact, there may
not even be much for the new officer Ben Wingate (Topher Grace) to do on a
day-to-day basis.
Of course, all of this changes when Hazel finds the body of
a local friend from church sitting in a living room chair without a head that’s
completely attached. Her throat has been nearly severed completely and her
mouth has been painstakingly put into an artificial scream, a technique that we’re
informed would take about an hour post-mortem as the killer holds the mouth
open and waits for rigor mortis to set in. Creepy, right? Things get even more
disturbing when someone else, in another jurisdiction but not too far for Hazel
to notice, ends up with part of their stomach removed the hard way. There’s a
serial killer in Canada. Can Hazel and new guy Ben get to the bottom of it?
It’s no spoiler to tell you who the serial killer is because
director Jason Stone sets up “The Calling” more as a cat-and-mouse game than a
mystery (one of many miscalculations). And so, early on, we meet Simon
(Christopher Heyerdahl), a man in a long black coat with a bag that portends
evil to come. Simon is a soft-spoken and yet notably creepy tall gentleman, who
seems to want to help, such as with the sick daughter of a waitress he meets,
but the film telegraphs his malevolence with every exaggerated framing or
underlining score. Hazel and Ben follow Simon’s path of destruction while we learn of the
serial killer’s religious motives and hope to God that the film has a surprise
or two up its sleeve. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
Sarandon, at first, seems to be sketching a lived-in
character, someone exhausted by life and just looking for a place to put her
feet up, pour a drink, and read a book. She’s well-cast for a role like that
but “The Calling” never lets her develop a character, pushing her into a
thriller plotline that even she appears bored by. Ellen Burstyn pops up as her
mother, which should be amazing given the talent of these two actresses, and
the resulting scenes prove that even the most remarkable casts can’t save
lackluster scripts and leaden direction. Donald Sutherland appears in not one
but two scenes to explain the plot. I’m not kidding. They were probably
storyboarded as “Donald Sutherland Explains the Movie.”
To be fair, there are a couple of sinister beats, such as
when Ben approaches a camper that we can just sense is going to house a whole
bunch of ugly, that work in the simplest of thriller terms. And the cast, as
they often do in failures like this, will walk away clean and move on to the
next project. You should just skip this one and join them.
Source: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-calling-2014
