Don't Hang Up 2016

DON'T HANG UP (2016)

 "You'll need to give me something in return, a life for a life."

A morality tale for the millennial age - a "harmless" prank, filmed for a youtube page, goes terribly wrong unbeknownst to the prankers. One man decides to take revenge and turn the tables on the young guys who spend their time drinking and pranking their neighbors.

The directorial debut of Damien Mace and Alexis Wajsbrot, Don't Hang Up follows Brady (Garrett Clayton), Sam (Gregg Sulkin) and Mosley who enjoy making prank calls - one specifically involves calling a mother in the middle of the night and pretending to be the police. They tell this young mom that there's an intruder in her home and her daughter is in danger. They upload their prank videos to the internet and live for all the views and comments they get, giving them a bit of internet fame.
One weekend, Sam, who's girlfriend Peyton (Bella Dayne) has just broken up with him, is partying with his friend Brady and the two of them decide to prank some neighbors and friends to cheer Sam up. But when they receive a phone call from someone called Mr. Lee, they realize the tables have been turned on them. Only Mr. Lee isn't fucking around.

Overall

This is like Saw meets Unfriended. But not as good as either of those movies. I completely get where this movie is coming from - I like this sort of morality tale gone wrong story about the quest for internet fame and taking things too far. We see stuff like this all the time nowadays - nasty prank videos, young kids filming awful stuff just to get hits. Hell, last month a girl live streamed a fatal car crash of her friends and is now facing jail time. This story is relevant. But it doesn't hit as hard as you'd like it to.

First off the main characters are quite awful to watch - in no way are you rooting for them, but you also don't care if they die. They're very basic stereotypes of young men. Sam with his high school sweetheart who just wants to get her back. Brady is a young guy who wants to go to film school but he knows his grades aren't good enough so he's joining the military. (Which - side note - you don't need good grades to get into film school ya'll - you just need $24K and a great story idea). They're very cookie cutter version of bros we see nowadays in school. But maybe there's just too many of these in movies lately, or maybe these just weren't fleshed out enough. I did not like these characters at all and found them very boring to watch. When they went through the inevitable realization that they are not good people and they should've made better choices, it's almost eye rolling.

BUT...let's talk about the good stuff...

 
Positives:

• The Mr. Lee character was incredible - from the voice, to the mask, to the games he plays, it's all spot-on and really well done. He was really spooky and I found myself looking forward to the scenes he would be in.
• Also Mr. Lee's backstory was really great and while you could figure out some of it, seeing what really set him off shocked me. I had no idea. And that final scene with the mom and her child was really shocking and well done. 
• err....Mr. Lee?

Negatives:

• It got really confusing, and not in a fun twisty turny way, more so in a "we've lost the plot" kind of way. It was hard to keep track of what was a prank and what wasn't.
• The camera angles were strange and the entire film was odd in the way it was handled - sometimes it was like weird zooming around drone footage, sometimes it was hand held, sometimes it was a regular shot. It didn't flow well at all and just added to the confusion.

Don't Hang Up is an alright movie - I didn't get bored, but I wasn't losing my shit. So I'm going to give it a 6/10

Now I'm off to watch the entire Saw franchise!

Stay spooky!