Don’t Hang Up? No. Hang Up ASAP!
Don’t Hang Up is one of the worst horror movies of 2017 with an interesting premise. Two best friends, Sam Fuller (Gregg Sulkin) and Brady Mannion (Garrett Clayton) are known to do prank calls on a famous “discount YouTube” channel with their buddy Roy AKA PrankMaster69 (Edward Killingback) and prank people in dire situations. One night, Sam and Brady are alone and start prank calling, until they call the wrong number — one named Mr. Lee (Parker Sawyers) who decides to give a taste of their tasteless prank calls by kidnapping Brady’s parents and forcing them to kill either Brady or Sam. “A soul for a so “— excuse me…“A life for a life”.
Don’t Hang Up presents its protagonists as legitimate assholes who crave nothing but attention and love the celebrity that their tasteless prank calls bring to their own egos. Which is why you unironically root for Mr. Lee. Maybe his methods go too far in some places, how would you feel if a simple, harmless (if you will) prank goes too far and is responsible for the death of her wife (Sienna Guillory) and child? This is what Mr. Lee faces while he decides to teach the “pranksters” a lesson. You can’t help but relate to Mr. Lee’s anger and hate towards these assholes. None of the main characters are likeable and/or relateable. Maybe Sam is the most relatable of the bunch, but when you learn what happened with Mr. Lee’s wife and child, you’re like : “Naw, you deserve what’s coming for you assholes.” Maybe not the death of Brady’s parents, who have nothing to do with it, but the movie has a point when it comes to legit assholes on YouTube who think they own the world and crave nothing but attention. Case in point: Logan Paul. The film’s opening montage that shows how total assholes the “pranksters” are is a blunt reference and jab at how Logan Paul acts on YouTube; vile, egotistical asshole who thinks nothing but himself and puts me, myself and I first above all else.
This film should scare would-be “influencers” and YouTubers that think it’s OK to do whatever they want only for their own attention and ego. Remember the suicide forest video? Monetized, making fun of someone who killed himself just to crave attention — and it backfired. First video when he got back from his “hiatus”? Taze dead rats. He hasn’t learned anything and continues to try and feed his own ego, though no one really cares about him anymore. Logan Paul is a has-been.
The film also has a blunt commentary on domestic, accidental gun violence. While some movies get pulled because it promotes “mass gun-violence”, Don’t Hang Up reminds the audience members that gun violence can happen in your home with YOUR OWN gun. Mr. Lee’s wife believes the prank that killers are in her house, hears a noise, gets her gun to “protect herself”, goes to see her daughter’s room. She’s not there. She gets scared until she hears a door opening. She shoots whoever is there — but it’s actually her daughter who falls to her death. Grief-stricken, she commits suicide and Mr. Lee comes back home without a wife and child, all due to a “harmless” prank. The raw power of the scene is due to the gun, being the only object that Mrs. Kolbein (Guillory) think it can protect herself, but that backfires with it being a prank, but with also being the fact that she uses her own gun by killing one of her own. Accidental, domestic, gun violence happens everyday, which is why the directors don’t shy away from being highly political and call Donald J. Trump for tighter gun laws.
These sequences and commentaries on YouTube idiots and gun violence are the only good things that Don’t Hang Up has going for; the film is filled with horrible, below par performances from Gregg Sulkin and Garrett Clayton, B-Grade writing from B-Grade writers/directors, a predictable plot with predictable twists & turns until an ending that will literally make you go “wait what?!?” thinking that Mr. Lee went too far into teaching these assholes a lesson by framing Sam for double-murder and setting everything up while recording them. Mr. Lee is a social-media version of Jigsaw (if you will), and is the most compelling character of the movie, but looks like Caliban (Stephen Merchant) from Logan so I have no idea who on earth would want to marry him, let alone have a child with him. The biggest twist of the movie, is when Mr. Lee disguises Brady as him, and Sam thinks it’s him and kills him, until he finds out, with a “Semper Fidelis” tatoo, that it was actually Brady. The scene is very well-done. Aside from that, Don’t Hang Up is a boring, cheesy and highly predictable horror movie that should just be left alone, unless you’re looking for a highly interesting social and political commentary on YouTube and domestic gun violence.
✯½
