Kelsie Kimberlin travels to Ukraine to pay tribute to her cousin who was killed fighting the Russian invasion of the country. She travels the country seeing for herself what the Russians have done, seeing how the Ukrainians have responded and paying tribute to her lost cousin.
THE LAST CALL frustrates me. Containing some of the best “you are there” footage in any documentary I’ve seen on Ukraine, it is packaged with a lot of slick material that comes off wrong.
The best part of the film are the sequences where we see Kimberlin talking to various Ukrainians and showing what the Russians have done. The words and images in those sequences are moving. Having seen several dozen documentaries of the invasion it was nice to see something that didn’t feel recycled.
The thing is that the film has one problem that works against the film.
The problem is that as much as the film is about Ukraine, the war and the cousin lost to the fighting, the film also is very much about Kimberlin. She is almost always front and center looking perfect and she is always giving us her opinion about what we are seeing. There are times you will wonder what the film is about, the people of Ukraine or the young lady from America who seems to be important since President Biden writes her a letter of condolences. It wouldn’t be bad, but Kimberlin comes across as incredibly plastic with everything she says over wrought and overdone. She is bleeding all over the place with her love for the Ukrainian people and it comes off not only as disingenuous but also as almost silly propaganda. I don’t say that lightly. I say that because after seeing dozens of Ukraine docs, this is the first time I have ever felt that I was watching something that was amped up and need to make the Russians out to be bad guys despite it being clear. This is not a documentary so much as an influencer trying to put themselves into the Ukraine conflict and let us know that war is bad.
Despite the moving moments, this is not recommended.
