On the Line is a 2022 thriller written, produced and directed by Romuald Boulanger, running 104 minutes, starring Mel Gibson as Elvis Cooney, a provocative Los Angeles shock jock working the graveyard slot, with William Moseley as Dylan, the station's new intern. It holds one of the more damning critical consensuses I have read, which notes that the film begins with a solid concept before stumbling over its own twists on the way to what they describe as a disaster of an ending. Having now watched it, I consider that generous.

Let me begin with my genuine question, which is what the point of this film actually was. I do not mean that rhetorically. I would like somebody to explain the intention, and then I would like them to explain why I watched it.

Everything here is fake. And then, having established that it is fake, it turns out to be fake again. Double fake.

Here is what happens. A caller identifying himself as Gary contacts the show and informs Elvis that his careless, cruel on-air pranks drove his girlfriend, a former switchboard operator at the station, to take her own life. He has taken Elvis's wife and daughter hostage, and he is going to make him pay. Over the following stretch, Elvis is forced to confess things live on air, forced to jump from the roof of the building, and then made to listen as Gary apparently shoots his family down the phone line. He is subsequently informed that they are in fact alive, somewhere inside the building, with explosives strapped to them.

And then none of it is real. The entire scenario was staged. And Dylan, the new intern whom Elvis humiliated with a prank in the film's opening minutes, is not an intern at all. He is a professional stuntman, and he was part of the operation from the beginning.

So the whole thing is a prank about a prank. A prank on his prank. Boulanger apparently intends this as a satire on misinformation and media manipulation, which is a very generous framing for what functionally amounts to the film turning to camera and saying "got you" after a hundred minutes.

Big time jokers, these guys.

And I want to sit with the moral dimension for a moment, because it is genuinely deranged. Set the filmmaking aside entirely. Within the story, a group of people decided that the appropriate response to a man being an unpleasant colleague was to convince him that his wife and daughter had been executed, and then to let him continue believing that for a considerable period while he ran through a burning building. That is not a prank. That is a sequence of serious criminal offences, and the film treats it as a bit of fun.