Night Call

Blanchart’s high-octane debut makes for a dazzling and entertaining ride.

While “Night Call” delivers in the thriller department of the narrative, it stumbles when trying to tackle the politics of the day.

As the film sprints to a hard deadline, the audience is bound to be almost as breathless as the locksmith. “Night Call” is as close as most of us will ever come to spending a memorable night in Brussels.

The film may be sticking to a familiar template, in which a regular Joe gets sucked into an underworld, but Blanchard’s snappy direction and the great mileage he gets out of the city’s nooks and crannies bumps it up the crime-action totem pole.

Michiel Blanchart’s film often feels like a patchwork of half-developed ideas, each more loosely and tenuously woven into the whole than the last.

Night Call takes the events of one night to the absolute limits when Mady finds himself landing in hot water with plenty of action and tension.

This taut Belgian thriller shrewdly plugs its plot holes with shots of adrenaline and underlying social commentary.

“Night Call” may seem slight at first, a pandering genre picture. But look closer and you’ll discover a flick with plenty of substance, an exhilarating example of nuts-and-bolts filmmaking that there’s just not enough of anymore.

A lazy potboiler that takes a promising idea and renders it in such shallow and superficial terms that it actually feels like the bland remake of a much stronger and smarter film

There's a desperation to Night Call that extends beyond the mechanics of the plot...