Toll Free

I have a pretty lenient policy for rating the movies that I review. This admission should surprise no one -- the lowest rating I've ever given something at the time of this writing is 45/100, and that's for Killing Ramza Brave, a movie that pretty much everyone agrees is a festering, bloated narrative mess and should never have been made. The reason for this is that 3DMM is a dated program with tons of glitches and limitations, and to put forth effort at all is a rare thing for most of the community; this doesn't call for lower standards in reviewing, per se, but I believe it does call for a rating scale that leans higher than lower most of the time. Encouragement is all movies are made for, after all -- there's no money, no job opportunities, just the admiration and respect of fellow moviemakers driving us forward. So I try to avoid being ridiculously negative with reviews and criticism and whatnot.

Even with this in mind, though, I can say with no hesitation or guilt that Toll Free is the biggest narrative failure I've ever seen in my entire life.

To quote Jon Barton's review of KRB, there was no part of me that enjoyed this movie. The writing was amateur, the dialogue moronic and obvious to the point of parody, and worst of all, the premise showing hints of brilliance but used in such a shoddy and broken way as to destroy all hopes of redemption the awesome animation and visual flair could have offered in another movie. Santiago essentially takes top-notch charge of a script that wasn't worth a movie half the length of this one. The direction might have been called good, if the story being directed wasn't so awful and poorly scripted that there's little to actually direct.

For the longest time I've made fun of Z-Man because he has such a powerful loathing for Jeremy Dick's acting abilities that it's quite simply hilarious to me. At the end of Toll Free, I wasn't laughing. Jeremy has a kind of nasal monotone that works in a character actor sort of way, and even then there's a limited range. When he acts every character in a movie, it's PAINFUL. I have no real problems with the guy, but this is some of the worst non-prepubescent voice acting I've ever heard in the 3DMM community. He sounds distracted, he puts no inflection into what the characters are saying, he fumbles lines AND STILL USES THEM. Of course, lines like, "Yeah, those kids are starving to death every day!" don't help much. The combination of the deadpan, obvious dialogue and Jeremy's deadpan, clichéd delivery make Toll Free play like the chain-yanking, sob-story commercials it attacks, right down to the ulterior motive that casually destroys the values it claims to have. This is a story so self-defeatingly pointless that it's almost surreal.

It starts promisingly enough. We see one of those 'starving child' commercials that I think get parodied more often than they actually exist; when the cameraman cuts, the sensitive and sincere actor turns into a jackass and demands his doughnut as the painted sky background is moved off the stage. The child stares hungrily at the actor as he munches it down in one gulp. Aside from the cruddy acting, this is actually not a bad start. Unfortunately, we then cut to our protagonists and the whole thing falls flat on its face. I've never heard dialogue so bad in a 3DMM movie. Not even KRB. It's so fake-sounding it's almost insulting to listen to. One of the two main characters is taken in completely by the commercial and the other tells him that it's all a scam. The movie then turns into, of all things, a PAM. Santiago's camerawork is at its best here, and at times the arcs and pans and slam-bang sleekness of the gunfight sequences rise above your disgust for the totally braindead plot.

Santiago deserves his own paragraph as far as I'm concerned. The visual style to Toll Free is simply beautiful. From Santiago's trademark sky to the hair-thin black outlines around boxes and various other objects to the comic-bookish motion lines and lens flares to the unparalleled detail put into the default actions, this movie should jump right off the screen and come to life before your eyes. It doesn't, but that's little fault of the director's. There's a great effect used when the jackass actor talks -- Santiago makes him blink just before his head moves in another direction, the same trick Goro uses on his HMCs. Since the talking movements for default actors are already more detailed than HMCs get on average, this works really, really well. Again, not enough to make the verbal garbage spewing forth from his mouth seem interesting, but it's something you notice.

Toll Free is one of those movies you can't deny the stupidity of. At best, you can smirk at it and enjoy the way it dubiously stumbles along, and admire it as a Santiago Miglionico compilation that for whatever reason has a dumb-ass plot attached. When you do, I advise you turn off the sound, though.

Critical Score: 40/100.
Personal Score: 25/100.