Phoned In
There's trouble on the line in "Cellular." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Clever idea.
The Downside: Clever idea a good movie does not make.
The best word that I can think of to describe Cellular is inefficient. After all, how can a movie that moves as much as this be so painfully dull? This is a movie that never stands still, not even for a moment, and not once did I feel engaged, enthralled, or anything close to an adrenaline rush. I was more inspired by the scenery in Hero than any scene of vehicular of human chaos in this whole washout.
Oh, yes- Cellular moves fast, but it is more like watching chess pieces being dispatched among a board at high-speed. There isn't any doubt that the high-concept plot throws its characters through an endless array of hoops, but it does so with the conviction of a trick pony on Valium. If you've even been a modest fan of action films before, I'd wager that there is nothing here you haven't seen before- and couldn't see coming a mile down the road.
The story involves a soft-spoken high school science teacher (Kim Basinger) who is abducted from her home by a lot of stock-looking baddies (lead by Snatch's Jason Statham) and tossed into a deserted-looking attic. Just to prove they're serious, the kidnappers smash a rotary phone hanging on the wall to pieces. Jessica Martin has no idea what the kidnappers want, but is able to use the shattered remains of the phone to dial up Ryan, an oafish surfer dude who goes into action hero mode once he realizes that the woman on the other end of the line isn't a crank.
The idea is on the low side of preposterous, but there are a lot of movies that have been more unbelievable that I've been sucked into (think about The Village). But it isn't the idea that fumbles here, its the execution. Director David R. Ellis (a former stunt man whose last movie was Final Destination 2) makes the actors, the characters, nothing more than passive stand-ins that everything is supposed to happen to. Even when Ryan takes off in a stolen security car after Jessica's kidnapped son (the movie seems like it is set in an alternate universe where everyone leaves their keys in their car), it feels like a component of plot necessity as he barrels down LA freeways, often in the wrong lane (this was done far better in Ronin). As close as Cellular comes to originality is with the introduction of William H. Macy as a cop on the verge of retirement (gee, we haven't seen that before...) who begins to realize that this kid who is stealing cars and cell phone chargers all over the city might be onto something.
Cellular's screenstory is by Larry Cohen, the mastermind behind last year's underrated find, Phone Booth. Both movies are about people in peril on one end of a phone line, but the similarities stop there. In Phone Booth, Joel Schumacher used a unique texture to create a movie that felt out of its time- a morality play when morality plays weren't fashionable anymore. With Cellular, there's nothing deeper than what's on the surface. As Ryan creates havoc darting all over the city trying to save Martin's family, the reasoning behind the kidnapping slowly begins to emerge. The problem is, once it is known, it turns out to be as bland and ordinary as everything else.
Basinger manages to hold her own and Macy deserves more than what the material gives him. As far as Chris Evans (as Ryan), he's going to need roles with far more meat than this if he's going to have any staying power. The movie does try to trot out some comic relief in the form of an uber-obnoxious lawyer (Rick Hoffman) who manages the near-impossible feat of being the only person in the whole picture to display any life.
There's a fair chance that Cellular could have been made into a good movie, but it comes off as shapeless, lacking any inspiration or guts. It is little more than a gimmick stretched out to feature length- and here we are, left on hold, waiting for some kind of thrill to come through. C
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