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Movie Review: 'The Death of a Telemarketer' and the Uncanny Valley of Mediocrity

Neither good or bad, The Death of a Telemarketer is trapped somewhere between competent and who cares.

By Sean PatrickPublished 2 years ago 6 min read
Top Story - December 2021
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It’s not that there aren’t truly bad movies anymore but rather that our society has changed to such a degree that it has become harder for a movie to be truly incompetent or terrible. The incompetent and the terrible still exist but they are finding it harder to escape into the mainstream. In their place have arisen movies that are competent but tone deaf. These movies are well made enough to convince people that they deserve to exist but they aren’t objectively good movies. Mediocre is one way to describe these movies or perhaps merely dull.

A good example of this new equilibrium of mediocre is The Death of a Telemarketer. This ‘comedy’ about a telemarketer held at gunpoint and forced to make an apology to people he called on the ‘Do Not Call list’ is competently made with a premise that is easily relatable. It features actors who are clearly talented and direction that isn’t objectively terrible. And yet, this isn’t a very good movie. The Death of a Telemarketer just sort of exists for 90 plus minutes never quite being entertaining but never being so objectionable as to make you want to turn it off. It’s an uncanny valley sort of terrible, it’s hard to say why it’s not good but you know it when you see it.

Lamorne Morris, late of TV’s New Girl, is the lead in The Death of a Telemarketer. He’s the telemarketer of the title whose life will be threatened by a character played by the terrific character actor Jackie Earl Haley. Morris’s Kasey is a hotshot telemarketer who is on his way to a victory in a sales contest that will earn him 3 grand cash. He’s so confident in winning that he walks out in the middle of a sales meeting so he can beg his ex-girlfriend, played by Alisha Wainwright, to go to dinner with him. Kasey plans to ask her to marry him and he’s taken out a $3000.00 loan with a dangerous loan shark in order to buy her a ring.

Thus, when Kasey returns to the office to find that his co-worker Barry, played by Woody McClain, has caught up to his sales total and will be taking his prize, Kasey becomes desperate. Needing the money, Kasey decides to stay late at work and try to get a sale to surpass Barry. So, Kasey decides to dig into the contacts on the company’s do not call list, the only list that currently isn’t completely played out by the recent call blitz. This leads Barry to call a man named Asa Ellenbogen, played by Jackie Earl Haley. Having Googled Asa before the call, Kasey pretends to be a friend of Asa’s from High School, unaware that this friend has died.

Alisha Wainwright in The Death of a Telemarketer

So angry is Asa that he decides to drive to Kasey’s office, with his son, Jim, played by Haley Joel Osment, sneaking him inside by pretending to be a repairman. Asa has a gun and as I explained earlier in this review, he wants Kasey to call and apologize to people on the Do Not Call List until someone accepts his genuine apology. If Kasey cannot complete this task in 90 minutes, Asa will kill him. Meanwhile, Kasey’s ex is waiting for him at a nearby restaurant, unaware of his predicament and suspicious because Kasey never doesn’t answer a text.

I put the word ‘comedy’ in quotation marks earlier because I am genuinely uncertain whether The Death of a Telemarketer is a comedy or a drama. Obviously, it’s a mix of the two but there aren’t any really good laughs in the movie. There are attempts at humor but they are rarely even mildly amusing. That means we should be taking this material seriously then right? Except the drama of The Death of a Telemarketer is only surface level. There is a life and death implication to what is happening here, Asa does have a gun and does claim to want to kill Kasey but tonally neither Haley or Morris seems to know whether to play the material with gravity or try to keep it light.

The biggest problem however is a lack of an arc for Kasey. One would assume that Kasey, being an arrogant, amoral, telemarketer should learn a valuable lesson about toning down his egotism, valuing his relationships more than money, and become a more empathetic person. That kind of happens but the final act seems to negate any growth or realization Kasey may or may not be having in favor of a rather rushed conclusion to the hostage plot.

Similarly, from what happens in the plot, Asa should learn to be more forgiving, less angry, and have a cathartic realization that taking someone hostage and threatening to kill them should not be a go to tactic. Instead, what we get is a mishmash of his motivation related to an overly complicated backstory about his late wife and her having repeatedly been duped by telemarketers throughout their marriage and before her untimely death. Haley tries to invest in Asa’s grief but the movie can’t seem to commit to whether Asa is just a sad and bitter man or a genuinely unhinged lunatic. Haley Joel Osment's performance muddies the water further by delivering a fully comedic performance as a bumbling criminal and yet another variation of the infantilized manchild so many modern screenwriters pass off as comedy. Osment and Jackie Earl Haley are supposed to be father and son but where Haley is weird and intense, Osment is broad and silly. They barely seem like characters in the same movie, let alone characters intended to be related.

I will say I did like the final moment of The Death of a Telemarketer. The movie pays off a bizarre aside from earlier in the movie in a very funny way. It’s one of the only laughs in the entire movie and it comes from being a funny bit of misdirection and from LaMorne Morris’ energetic dedication to the bit. I like LaMorne Morris, he’s a genuinely funny actor with a breadth of charisma. Unfortunately Morris is trapped within the uncanny tone of The Death of a Telemarketer unclear where he’s supposed to be serious or where he’s supposed to crack wise.

Unable to generate laughs and incapable of portraying anything seriously, The Death of a Telemarketer plugs a long competently crafting scene after scene without building either comic or dramatic momentum. The movie seems to content to merely exist and hope for the best about maybe being funny or maybe stumbling over a moment of cathartic drama or character growth but unable to commit to either comedy or drama. These two things aren't mutually exclusive, comedy or drama is not a required choice. Many very good movies have both comedy and heartfelt drama. The Death of a Telemarketer sadly exists somewhere specifically in between comedy and drama unable to mine either for anything genuine. Thus, somehow, nothing in the movie is funny or dramatic. It's just sort of happening hopeful that perhaps comedy or drama may occur at some point.

Here's an example of what I am talking about. Early on, in the telemarketing scenes that establish Kasey as the top salesman, the film establishes a sort of bro-ey, frat humor in which insecure man-boys enact insults on each other's manhood and are rewarded for their biggest lies that lead to big sales. This is supposed to elicit laughter for how audacious and boisterous it is but it's mostly unoriginal and not particularly funny.

Later in the movie, amid the drama of the hostage situation, Kasey places a call to his father. The two are distant and the father is deeply disapproving of Kasey's chosen profession. Kasey has called his father but has not told Asa who he is calling. Cues indicate slowly and dramatically who Kasey is talking to and the movie wants to have a genuine dramatic catharsis but it ends on this very abrupt note that I mentioned earlier, the endgame of the hostage situation. There is no payoff to the Kasey's father stuff and it ends up a pointlessly morose and unresolved bit of drama. And that right there is The Death of a Telemarketer in a nutshell.

The Death of a Telemarketer is available now for On-Demand rental.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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