This is one of those films that just lays there and screams "LOOK AT ME! I'M SO DAMNED MEANINGFUL, AREN'T I?" Before it was halfway over, all I wanted to scream back was "NO! YOU DAMNED WELL AREN'T!"
I'm not even sure where to start with this thing. The plot is largely built on a mystery that it all but gives away within the 1st 15 minutes. T he viewer is left to just sit there and stew, waiting for the film to finally get around to what you already know is coming. And when the plot isn't dawdling over non-mysterious mysteries, it relies on contrivances straight out of a 1970s political thriller. Nothing the main character does makes a lick of sense. Two essentially brand new characters are introduced at the midpoint of the movie to keep dragging the exhausted narrative along. The soundtrack practically assaults you with this mournful tinkling on the piano, which honestly serves as something of a respite from the stilted dialog. Oh, and Elliot Gould walks around with a mustache that looks like it's trying to eat the lower half of his face.
The story begins in 1944 France as two young boys flee from the war into the woods, jumps forward to post 9/11 New York City and an old dude riding around in a town care and then flashes back to 1940 France where a tow-headed boy talks about fairies with his mother. After that inauspicious beginning, I should have known what I was in for.
The old dude turns out to be Jimmy (Frank Langella), a financial analyst who is a cog in the global machine that traps developing countries into inescapable debt. Then, in a not terribly clear manner, Jimmy double crosses his associates and when he knows they're planning to kill him, asks for two more weeks to live. That's so Jimmy can disguise his voice and hire a private investigator named Frank (Elliot Gould) over the phone. Jimmy asks Frank to follow him around and report what he sees, with Frank not knowing he's spying on the guy who hired him. And yes, it turns out that Jimmy and Frank are the two young boys from 1944 France. The movie doesn't make that explicit until later on, but there's never any other explanation offered up.
The whole Frank following Jimmy for Jimmy thing peters out after a while, and that's when we're fully introduced to Eileen (Laura Harring), Jimmy's sophisticated girlfriend and Lila (Anabel Sosa), a young girl that Jimmy has befriended in a very non "To Catch A Predator" way. Laura Harring is impressively sexy, except when she's doing some very karaoke-ish night club singing, but Eileen and Lila are really just there to give Jimmy an excuse to explain the whole Jimmy-Frank mystery that anyone in the audience with 1/4th of a brain had already mostly figured out on their own.
The film ends with the bad guys trying to kill Jimmy and Frank driving a mid-sized pleasure boat, of all things, to the rescue. By this point, I was so disgusted with this whole thing that I desperately wanted the monster from Cloverfield to show up and eat everybody.
Frank Langella and Gould are superb actors. Here, however, they're tasked with finding interesting ways to be dull. The effect is a little like watching someone comb and style their own pubic hair. Even when you recognize they're doing a good job, it's still not anything you want to look at.
I suppose if The Caller hadn't spelled out early on the "secret" relationship between Jimmy and Frank, hadn't revealed to the viewer that Jimmy was the one who hired Frank and didn't clearly illustrate why Jimmy was doing what he was doing, this might possibly have been a slightly intriguing motion picture. What it ends up being is proof that if you start out with an utterly ridiculous and even more obvious story, you can try and film it in the slowest, most self-important way possible and the ridiculous obviousness will still overwhelm any attempt to class it up.
