Halle Berry is a very good actress who happens to be very beautiful. She has a secret. She has no idea what to do with her hair. BUT, her character knows what to do with phone calls. That's right, she works in the 911 center of a major metropolis, and she has to deal with tense situations. This seems to be a great platform for some drama, am I right?
Okay, what is the first thing you don't want in your 911 operator? Halitosis? No, that'd be fine, as she would be on the phone. Stuttering? Well, that would certainly be bad, and she doesn't have it - so that's good. How about prone to panic? Yup, that'd be terrible for an emergency operator. Just imagine someone who couldn't handle a stressful situation, had been working for years as a 911 operator, and still doesn't know the procedures. Well, here's your girl!
Somehow, despite a supporting character stating that the 911 center wouldn't know what to do without her, she has a crippling inability to deal with stressful situations and has virtually no idea what she's doing. And so... time for an emotional call coupled with failure! She gets a call from a girl who is in the middle of having her house broken into. I won't give it away, but something horrible happens.
Our heroine breaks down and just can't do it anymore. So, what do we do with a person who has training which she doesn't understand and is incapable of doing the simple job in the first place? We have her train people! That should end well! Oh, look, there's one of her trainees now answering the phone. And... PANIC! She's been trained well. Time for our hero to step in and save the... PANIC!
The movie has a few twists and turns that are pretty horrendous. Their technical knowledge was pretty abysmal, and the attempt to string things together with the wacky drunk guy who calls every night was distracting and inane. But the movie is tolerable in a Lifetime movie kind of way. I mean, it was better than most lifetime movies, but I won't be surprised to see that it is featured on Lifetime sometime soon. And I probably won't watch it.
1.75/5