Long Distance

Long Distance

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Hardly challengind the Kellermanns or Wes Craven

Reviewed by Jacques COULARDEAU, 2009-06-03

The film is very good till the very last two minutes. You will really be thrilled and frightened by this film but you will lose tracks of any rational meaning at the end. After a while you will not know who is who and where you stand and that will be definitely scary. A good thriller provide you do not try to understand the end. The punch line will punch you down flat on the ground. Some will tell you that end does not provide you with a solution to the crimes. True. But at the same time some others will say the solution is quite obvious. And that's where I say all rational logic is lost. No matter who the killer could be how could he or she be in four or five states away from the original place, and at the same time with the girl who would be seized by a serious case of delusion. Then what is the role of the FBI profiler all along and even after the last crime? She has been a witness of it all and yet she completely goofed it off and down. That does not work. To know the killer at the end is not important but all the possible solutions have to be possible not materially impossible.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

I loved this movie!

Reviewed by iluv2befit, 2008-02-28

This movie is awesome! Very well done and enjoyable to watch. A must for fans who like suspense.

Excellent Thriller Gets Sabotaged By Awful Ending

Reviewed by Stephen B. O'Blenis, 2007-12-04

"Long Distance" spends the first 85 or so minutes of its 93-minute running time establishing itself as one of the better thrillers ever made, and the rest of the length deflating terribly with an ending that just doesn't work, and worse, detracts badly from the rest of the movie. It's a shame because everything up until that point was very well done, not just thrown together, with some fine performances; in the end though, the desire to have an unexpected twist ending instead of a more generic finish proved to be its undoing.

Monica Keena (Lori from "Freddy Vs. Jason") plays a girl named Nicole who dials a wrong number (by one digit) from her apartment, and ends up getting a strange, creepy voice on the other end. After some unsettling comments from her wrong number, she hangs up, but gets called right back. The benefits of caller ID. It turns out Nicole's interrupted the work of a serial killer, who's become interested in the idea of playing mind games with her. So over the next few days he calls and re-calls her with more taunts. Once the police are involved, the discovery is made that each call is being made from closer and closer as the caller crosses the country to Nicole's current location, and worse still, each call turns out to have been made from the site of a different recent murder.

It's a great concept with real suspense, and the subtle relationship budding between Nicole and the police officer assigned to be her main protection is very skillfully handled. Nicole's apartment building is watched constantly and guarded by the police as they wait to capture the killer if he makes it that far, while other police forces across the country try to use clues from the phone calls to home in on him before he kills anyone else. And then....

The fact that everything is done so well for well over an hour makes the ending all the more regrettable. If they were going for a twist they got it, because I never remotely saw it coming until it started happening. And I remember as it was starting just thinking Oh-no,-they're-Can't-be-going-where-I-think-they're-going-with-this. This type of ending has been done in sort of the same way a few times previously. It never worked then, and it didn't work here. If they'd just gone with a generic, happened-a-thousand-times-before finale, it might have been anticlimatic, but it would have left the movie as a whole relatively unscathed. I don't mean to be so negative, but I hated to see such a great movie hamstrung so badly by its end. If "Long Distance" had been just an okay movie with a weak ending, it wouldn't have been so unfortunate, but it was So good right up until the last ten minutes or so.

Now others might find the conclusion a lot more palatable than I did - it Was unexpected, and the good acting carries through even despite...well. But for me, it was on its way to being a 9/10 or so, and it dropped down to about a five. I'd really like to round the star rating up to three in honor of its early going, but I've made the mistake previously of rating too many really fine movies with a three-star (maybe I set the bar too high early on) that I can't justify it here. I wish there was a two-and-a-half star option.

To make up for having to admit how disappointing the ending was, I'll finish off with a recap of some of the many positives. Innovative idea, fine pacing, strong performances (especially by Keena), a few terrifically tense moments and some surprisingly touching ones. I'm still glad I saw it, but when it was over it just seemed so unfortunate that they came close to hitting the jackpot and missed it by one number that was so far off base; I'd definately recommend renting before buying. The cast and crew all did well; maybe they should reunite for another movie. Heck, maybe they should reunite and remake this and not take that twist.

That first 85 minutes or so was awfully good, though.

Sorry, Wrong Number - Gone Cellular

Reviewed by R. Schultz, 2007-03-20

This movie is a cousin of the classic thriller, "Sorry, Wrong Number," in which Barbara Stanwyck overhears a murder being plotted when she gets a crossed wire. Those were the days of telephone exchanges run by human operators.

Here instead of those manual exchanges, we get the potential danger of Caller ID. Instead of invalid Barbara Stanwyck, we get young and lushly beautiful Monica Keena. On her own in the big city, she should be safely enough immured in her apartment complex, but she finds she has been made only too vulnerable as a result of all those features that come with a typical Call Package. The trouble again comes from a wrong number - this time a wrong number that she herself dialed.

As Keena realizes her predicament, she reconstructs events. She dialed a wrong number; her call was answered by a serial killer in the very act of slaughtering his victims in their home in a distant city; the killer recovers Keena's number and address from Caller ID; he takes sadistic, erotic glee in calling her back, taunting, increasingly close and personal; the killer starts making his way across country towards her, leaving a trail of victims in his wake.

This is a compelling, frightening premise. And while I at first thought Keena was overacting, striking the wrong note, and exposing the budget Indie roots of this movie - I changed my mind as I got to know her character better. I think Keena pushes all the right buttons after all.

A Good Start But... (spoiler warning!!!)

Reviewed by Jason Whitt, 2007-02-21

I have a few problems with this film. First, hasn't the "I know you're home alone" routine been done to death? This is a forgivable sin in my book however since I have a soft spot for slasher films.

My second issue is that this film was marketed as a gory horror flick which it certainly is not. The DVD disc itself is adorned with copious blood splatters and a shot of the main character giving her best "Psycho" shower scream. Alas, a few bloody sheets in crime photos are as close as this one gets to a slasher. But sadly this film even fails as a psychological/serial killer thriller.

The first act of this film is actually pretty good. The set-up is sufficiently engrossing and a few potentially interesting characters are introduced. However, as it moves into the second act, (which is the meat and potatoes of any film), it gradually unravels into a disjointed, overlong, and tedious mess with some pretty awful dialogue and acting thrown in for good measure (think Lifetime Network here). There are countless scenes which serve in no way to advance the plot.

The greatest sin of this film though, is that there is absolutely no sense of suspense or jeopardy after the first 20 minutes of the film. Any chance of that is dashed because the main character is accompanied in EVERY SINGLE SCENE either by a police detective who has opted to shack up in her apartment or the ever present and overacted FBI criminal psychologist. How can you create a sense of tension or danger when the girl is never alone!!! The only jeopardy is whether or not the cops can catch the killer before he claims another victim (which we don't really care about because we never see the killer or his random victims).

Of course the third act reveals the Shyamalanesque "twist" which is supposed to wipe away all the nonsense you're forced to endure for over an hour in the second act. And really this third act "revelation" shouldn't be much of a surprise to most viewers. SPOILER ALERT!!! It is revealed that the events leading up to the "surprise" have taken place in the mind of the main character who is mentally distrubed. That's right folks, the dreaded dream sequence card is played to end this one. A cardinal sin in my book. While this "surprise" revelation does provide a perfectly logical reason for why the second act is such a trainwreck, it is in no way enough of a payoff to justify the viewer being subjected to over an hour of paper thin and ludicrous characters, inane dialogue and largely directionless scenes. Just because it turns out that the entire second act took place in the main character's mind doesn't change the fact that you still had to sit through it! Many will like the film simply for the gimmick. As moviegoers we seem to like to be tricked. But as evidenced by Long Distance, being tricked doesn't necessarily equate to good filmmaking.