It's been a good few years since I saw the Japanese original on which this film is based, but as I sat through what is yet another American retread of an Asian horror flick the original kept coming back to me. I had a sense of déjà vu, not just that I'd seen this stuff play out before, but I'd seen it done BETTER. And, in the end, that's the problem with all these remakes: they may have flashes of their own inspiration here and there, they may inject a chill in certain places, but they've been done before. The law of diminishing returns states that the original will probably be better than the remake, and that's the case here.
ONE MISSED CALL sticks extremely close to the original story, merely swapping Japan for America and filling the cast with poorer actors, with Ray Wise the only (albeit brief) exception. Edward Burns, as the whispering detective, is particularly bad. For some reason, the exceptionally eerie ringtone of the Japanese film has been replaced by a twee melody, while there's a lot more emphasis on computer-generated ghosts instead of the slow-burning atmosphere that makes the Japanese versions so superior. Each scene is telegraphed so far in advance and so familiar – by now not just from Asia but from previous remakes like THE RING, DARK WATER, SHUTTER – that this film ends up becoming entirely redundant and virtually unwatchable.
ONE MISSED CALL sticks extremely close to the original story, merely swapping Japan for America and filling the cast with poorer actors, with Ray Wise the only (albeit brief) exception. Edward Burns, as the whispering detective, is particularly bad. For some reason, the exceptionally eerie ringtone of the Japanese film has been replaced by a twee melody, while there's a lot more emphasis on computer-generated ghosts instead of the slow-burning atmosphere that makes the Japanese versions so superior. Each scene is telegraphed so far in advance and so familiar – by now not just from Asia but from previous remakes like THE RING, DARK WATER, SHUTTER – that this film ends up becoming entirely redundant and virtually unwatchable.