By Robert Scucci
| Published
Mel Gibson’s On the Line doesn’t seem like it’s worth your time if you’re just looking at the Rotten Tomatoes scores and taking them at face-value. But when you read the positive reviews, you’ll see another story unfold that makes you wonder how the film received a 21 percent critical score against a not-much-better 28 percent assessment on the Popcornmeter. Sometimes, you actually need to read the reviews to see what’s going on, and among the positive reviews for On the Line you’ll find that the people who actually had the patience to see this mystery thriller through to the end saw it for what it was, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
One review for On the Line went so far as to suggest that it’s the greatest thriller of all time. Unwilling to believe that this movie is either 21 percent bad or the absolute best of its kind, I went into my viewing thinking that I’ll probably walk away from it with a middle-of-the-road assessment, and was surprised to find out that this movie is pretty great, but it will piss you off you’re not ready to be messed with every step of the way.
An Exercise In Escalation
On the Line has a basic and familiar framework in the sense that it’s a classic hostage situation kind of movie. The only difference is that the hostage situation isn’t taking place at KLAT, the radio station where Elvis Cooney (Mel Gibson) hosts his shock jock talk show during the midnight slot. Elvis Cooney can be best described as somebody who’s kind but not nice, as his rough-around-the-edges on-air persona allows him to be as crude and rude as humanly possible under the guise of “telling it like it is,” much to the chagrin of this co-workers, switchboard operator, Mary (Alia Seror O’Neill), and newbie producer, Dylan (William Moseley).
However, when Elvis isn’t in character, you can tell he’s a decent guy who sometimes has trouble switching between his real-life and on-air personas, but clearly has a conscience.
Receiving a call from the film’s menacing antagonist, Gary (Paul Spera), that sets the events of On the Line in motion, Elvis learns that the caller has kidnapped his wife, Olivia (Nancy Tate), and daughter, Adria (Romy Pointet) and that he plans to kill them if Elvis doesn’t do his bidding, live on the air.
Through Elvis’ conversations with Gary in On the Line, we learn that Gary was in a relationship with the show’s previous switchboard operator, Lauren, who was allegedly driven to suicide because of the verbal abuse she endured during her time working on the show. Primed for revenge, Gary, who’s your typical cliché psychopath with nothing to lose to the point where it’s actually annoying, reveals that he’s wired the entire building to explode, and that Elvis has 40 minutes to make everything right.
What Kind Of B-Grade Movie BS Is This?
Pushing itself into increasingly ridiculous territory as it progresses into its second and third acts, On the Line is an incredibly frustrating movie because Gary is so over-the-top in his delivery that you don’t know who you’re supposed to be rooting for. It goes without question that Elvis is a jerk, but he’s simply playing a character that everybody else at KLAT clearly gets along with. But Gary, who has every right to feel that Elvis is responsible for Lauren’s death, has no concept of personal responsibility, and is willing to kill a lot of innocent people as a form of collateral damage for his convoluted revenge plot.
Realizing that Gary’s calls are coming from inside the station (another infuriating cliché), Elvis and Dylan try to track him down by sneaking past the security cameras’ blind spots, but find themselves on a wild goose chase as each door they breach leads them further away from where they need to be to stop the madness.
On The Line Requires Patience
By the time I got halfway through On the Line, I had that “a-ha!” moment, but still didn’t know where the film was going to take me. Having worked with M. Night Shyamalan on Signs, Mel Gibson is no stranger to twist endings, and On the Line makes no qualms about repeatedly misdirecting its audience to the point of making them tap out early if they don’t pick up on what this movie is throwing down because it’s frustrating by design. Thanks to Gary’s bad theater and calculating yet sloppy work, however, you’ll realize that things may not entirely be as they seem when the authorities get involved to help uncover the mystery behind Olivia and Adria’s kidnapping because they may not be as central to the storytelling as you initially think.
Listen, if you want to base your watchlist on what the critics on Rotten Tomatoes say about On the Line – or other similarly rated movies that have a healthy amount of 5-star reviews buried in the mix despite their abysmal numeric scores – you need to think about what the movie is aiming to accomplish, and see for yourself if it actually pulls it off. Otherwise, as comedian Patton Oswalt once said to a heckler, “you’re gonna miss everything cool and die angry.”
As of this writing, you can stream On the Line on Netflix.
