How did you even get this number?
Main Cast: Gregg Sulkin, Garrett Clayton
Directors: Damien Macé and Alexis Wajsbrot
In fiction, you usually want your focus character, the main character, to be your protagonist or hero. Sometimes you get a situation where the main character is the villain of the story, like the recent Curry Barker movie OBSESSION. Sometimes you get a story where the main characters are SUPPOSED to come across as the heroes, but in the end you see they got what they deserved. The older I get and the less tolerant of teenagers and their bullshit I become, the more certain I am they should have got it twice.
In the case of the 2016 movie DON’T HANG UP, written by Joe Johnson and directed by Damien Macé and Alexis Wajsbrot, we get Sam and Brady, two late teens who, along with another friend, have been making a name for themselves online by streaming prank phone calls. The movie opens with one such example where they wake a woman up in the middle of the night, say they’re the police and they have her house surrounded because there’s an intruder. Sam (Gregg Sulkin) and Brady (Garrett Clayton) think this kind of stuff is just the absolute height of hilarity.
One day, Brady comes over and finds Sam down in the dumps because his girlfriend Peyton (Bella Dayne) won’t talk to him, so Brady decides what Sam needs is to prank some people to cheer himself up. They make a few calls, order pizza to Sam’s neighbor Larry, then call Larry and tell him they’re calling to warn him of a local gang of thieves who pretend to be pizza delivery people in order to case their next heist, and then they point the camera outside to watch as hijinks ensue.
Their next call, however, doesn’t go quite so smoothly. The caller knows who they are. He calls them back when they hang up on him. He knows their names and addresses. He knows everything they’re talking about.
Okay, now we have a horror movie!
I was very intrigued by this premise, and any premise similar to it (I saw the Colin Farrell movie PHONE BOOTH in the theater), so this movie definitely had my attention.
But as the night wears on, as “Mr. Lee” on the other end of the line taunts the pair—he’s definitely got Brady’s parents tied up somewhere—the signposts all start a look a little bit obvious, to the point that, by the end of the movie, I’d predicted at least five plot points. And man, that sucks!
DON’T HANG UP came out in 2016. We’d had MANY similar movies before that, so they had plenty of time to recognize the cliches and write something different in order to avoid every “shocking reveal”. And you could tell they were all meant to be “shocking reveals”, they might as well have had neon signs flashing onscreen to make sure those people who watch movies while scrolling on their phone didn’t miss them. And yes, each one of them did have a profound effect on the plot.
But not a single one of them came as a surprise to anyone who has ever seen a movie at all in their entire life. Oh the best friend and the girlfriend are sleeping together and that’s why she’s been so distant? Oh no, I didn’t see that coming except that I totally saw it coming half an hour before they told us. Oh no, the killer put his mask on the best friend, put tape over his mouth, and taped a knife in his hand so the main character would think he was the killer and attack him? I never would have guessed that was happening … if I hadn’t already seen it in a hundred other movies over the years. I could go on, but it was actually a pretty well-made movie that I recommend, so I don’t want to give away ALL the “secrets” and ruin it too much. I will say, though, that even the reveal of the killer was NOT a surprise in any sense of the word. At all at all.
Having said all that, the performances were good. Gregg Sulkin and Garrett Clayton played their parts to the fullest, playing up the douchebag aspects of their characters when necessary, but still being able to dig a little deeper and show us they were more than just their pranks, which I appreciated.
The directors had a very interesting style as they wove in and out of different cameras we’re supposed to be seeing the action through. Visually, DON’T HANG UP was a very interesting movie. I just wish the plot had been a little less by the numbers. But in the end, it was a pretty decent movie with a few very tense moments and a premise that held my attention throughout. I saw this free—with ads—on the Fandango app, and it’s definitely worth sitting through a few ads to see. I recommend it.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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