90% of Everything is CrapOn the Line (2022)
On the Line isn’t a thriller. It’s a cinematic hazing ritual. It doesn’t just insult your intelligence — it treats you like you’re too fucking dumb to notice you’re being insulted in the first place. It’s the kind of film that kicks you in the balls and then says, “You’re welcome.”
The plot, such as it pretends to be, is built around a nesting doll of pranks so obnoxious, so utterly masturbatory, that they collapse under their own smug weight. There are, essentially, three: the “main” prank, which eats up 90% of the film’s runtime with fake tension; the second, a gotcha-within-a-gotcha that renders the first meaningless; and finally, the third, which reveals the whole exercise to be one extended middle finger aimed squarely at the audience.
On the Line is arguably the worst fucking movie of 2022 — even worse than Rob Zombie’s The Munsters. And yet, this concept can work. Talk Radio made claustrophobic rage into Shakespeare. The Guilty weaponized minimalism and guilt into nerve-flaying tension. Even Pontypool — a Canadian zombie thriller broadcast from a snow-locked radio booth — managed more narrative ingenuity with a fraction of the budget. On the Line, by contrast, wants the cachet of a clever meta-thriller but can’t be bothered to color inside the genre’s lines — or any lines, really. It’s a Rorschach blot of bullshit.
Elvis Cooney (Mel Gibson) is what you’d get if Orson Welles ate Howard Stern and shat him out. The film seems convinced it’s channeling War of the Worlds—some grand broadcast spectacle that toys with audience perception—but it’s just an excuse for a movie so convoluted that it opens with 15 solid minutes of foreshadowing and red herrings (so many that the film can’t even be bothered to keep track of the most prominent one). A movie so contrived it appears to be under the impression that letting the authorities know beforehand of a crime you plan to commit gives you carte blanche to go ahead and commit it.
Let’s talk logistics — because On the Line sure as hell won’t. Characters impersonate police officers (a crime), stage a fake hostage crisis on air (another crime), and tie up emergency services with a broadcasted hoax (yet another crime). And their defense? “We told Pasadena PD ahead of time.” Oh, did you? Did you also warn the millions of listeners who might reasonably call 911 when they hear live murder and kidnapping on air? This isn’t clever. This is legally actionable. Even the California Penal Code agrees — Section 538(d) says impersonating an officer is a misdemeanor. But sure, let’s go ahead and pretend the LAPD just rolled with it because Elvis gave them a heads-up.
Then again, common sense is kryptonite to a film like this. A couple of years ago Gibson starred in The Professor and the Madman, which featured the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum; the people in that movie were less deranged than the characters in On the Line, who are all without exception a bunch of irredeemable assholes and cunts — which of course raises the question, who among them could we ever hope to relate to or identify with?
Even Gibson’s usually effortless affability fails him. There’s something grimly ironic about casting Gibson in a role where he gaslights an entire city and then shrugs it off as «just a joke.» The man spent a decade doing that in real life. In Last Looks, there was a glimmer of self-awareness — a wry, almost apologetic turn that hinted he might be trying to exorcise his personal demons. But here, he’s just basking in them. On the Line unfortunately edges him more toward the kind of jackass prick that Gibson turned into in the mid-to-late 2000s.
I’m going to blame the filmmakers instead of Gibson, though, because they clearly didn’t have the slightest fucking idea what the hell they were doing. Their movie can’t even claim to be a spoof of the sort of thriller it appears to be on the surface, because even satire must be honest in order to be effective.
As I mentioned above, the butt of the joke is not a specific genre but the viewers themselves. There are shots, even whole scenes, featuring characters who are in on the joke acting, even amongst themselves, as if the whole thing were real. For whose benefit? The fictional victim? Nope. It’s for us, the poor suckers watching. The three-pronged prank is designed not to fool a character, but the viewer, making it not a twist but a lie.
The title itself is a lie. Nothing’s on the line here — not the host’s job, not the callers’ lives, not the moral fabric of broadcast journalism. The only thing actually at risk is your patience, your faith in storytelling, and your willingness to keep watching movies that think cruelty is cleverness. If the filmmakers were aiming to test their audience’s tolerance for cinematic trolling, then congrats: mission accomplished. But if they thought they were making some kind of bold, high-wire thriller, someone should’ve cut the fucking cord.
Works Cited
On the Line. Directed by Romuald Boulanger, performances by Mel Gibson and William Moseley, Saban Films, 2022.
The Game. Directed by David Fincher, performances by Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 1997.
Talk Radio. Directed by Oliver Stone, performance by Eric Bogosian, Universal Pictures, 1988.
Pontypool. Directed by Bruce McDonald, performance by Stephen McHattie, IFC Films, 2008.
The Guilty. Directed by Gustav Möller, performance by Jakob Cedergren, Nordisk Film, 2018.
The Professor and the Madman. Directed by Farhad Safinia, performances by Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, Vertical Entertainment, 2019.
California Penal Code § 538d. «Impersonating a Peace Officer.» California Legislative Information, State of California, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN§ionNum=538d.
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