BRAD Anderson’s cop thriller is a PR coup for the Los Angeles Police Department. The anchor for Richard D’Ovidio’s screenplay is its 911 call centre, where Jordan (Halle Berry) loses a battle of smarts with the kidnapper of a teenager.

Six months later, while training new staff, Jordan supports, then takes over from, a less-experienced colleague having difficulty with a similar case.

The kidnapped teenager Casey (Abigail Breslin) spends much of the film talking with Jordan from the boot of a car driven by the kidnapper (Michael Ecklund). Casey’s a middle-class featherhead whom Jordan has first to persuade to get over her hysterics and become a fighter.

There’ve been powerful serial killer movies in the past, such as “Silence of the Lambs” and “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Like those, “The Call” builds good tensions while the screenplay’s compresses its duration to less than a day despite using the familiar elements of happenstance, close shaves, mistakes and misfortunes.

Familiarity is no major defect because the pace is unrelenting, the characters are economically-drawn and the principal performances are sound. And the denouement is a cracker, definitely not familiar, worth waiting for despite its essential predictability.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight