Score: 5.9/10
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This movie gives no reason to care about the main character, Joe Baylor, or anyone else in it at any point. From the very beginning officer Joe Baylor seems to just be a dick who has gotten into some sort of trouble that landed him on phone duty as a 911 operator. And I guess he was sick or something? Unless I missed missed something that’s never really even explained. Anyway, he gets a call from a lady claiming that she has been kidnapped by her boyfriend and the rest of the movie has him trying to track them down and get her help. The next 45 minutes are just Joe Baylor angrily calling various people and yelling at them without actually being very helpful at all.
Finally, late in the movie they draw some emotion out of you when you learn the woman’s baby has been stabbed repeatedly presumably by the woman’s kidnapper. Officer Taylor manages to get the woman back on the phone and convinces him to attack her kidnapper when he stops the van and run away which she does successfully. Turns out that was a bad call because we learn that she is schizophrenic and she was the one who cut open the baby because she thought it had snakes in her stomach. Her “kidnapper” was just the father of her children trying to get her to the hospital who for some reason didn’t call for an ambulance or the police when he saw that his baby son had been stabbed and just left his 6 year old daughter in the house alone with the dying baby. Makes sense. Now we also learn that Joe Taylor is on phone duty because he killed a 19 year old kid and the only reasons given is because he could and that maybe the kid hurt somebody. Turns out officer Joe Taylor is a bad person after all. But at the end he calls his partner and tells him he doesn’t have to commit perjury for him the next day anymore so I guess he’s redeemed? The only good part about this ending is that the stabbed baby lives.
So overall if you want to watch Jake Gyllenhaal get angry at people on the phone for an hour and a half then this movie is for you. If you want to watch good movie with an actual plot and likable characters, I’d stay away from this one.
The Mainly Sports Corner 