Cellular
review by Agnieszka Tennant | posted 9/10/2004
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I tried hard to like Cellular, mostly because it stars one of my favorite actors, William H. Macy (Fargo, Magnolia). He gives one of the best and funniest performances of his career as a police desk sergeant Bob Mooney who is busy buying sea sponges and live algae facial masks in preparation to open a spa ("not a beauty parlor," as he likes to point out). Kim Basinger, who spends most of the 89-minute-long movie crying and talking to a phone, renders her character believably distraught. But neither Macy nor Basinger nor the intriguing setup nor the bursts of situational wit can rescue David R. Ellis's action thriller from joining the category of movies that are so bad they're good. I guess one can put it in more encouraging terms: it's a good bad movie.
Ryan (Chris Evans) gets the call that sends his life into chaos
Cellular is a roaming version of Phone Booth, the other thriller in which a phone connection is the protagonist's life line. No surprise there: the same Larry Cohen who wrote the script for Phone Booth constructed Cellular with an equally reckless abandon of logic.
A high school science teacher named Jessica Martin (Basinger) sees her son off to a school bus stop, and upon returning home, she is startled by armed intruders. Commencing a long string of improbabilities, they kill her maid the moment they enter the place. They kidnap Jessica and lock her in an attic of an unknown home. One of the abductors smashes the only phone in the attic. Alas, Jessica manages to put the shattered phone's wires together well enough to make a call.
Kim Basinger is making the call of her life—literally
She gets through to Ryan (Chris Evans), a superficial twentysomething man who is trying to win back the good graces of a hottie who believes that he's an undeserving slacker. We find him on the Santa Monica Pier, where he is not the only one ogling the perfect-figured women in bikinis. So, clearly, are the filmmakers; and they make sure that we are too.
Initially, Ryan thinks Jessica's call is a prank. He reluctantly agrees not to hang up on her and to take his cell phone to a police station so she can explain her predicament to a cop. But when he arrives at the station and attempts to hand his phone to a desk sergeant (Macy), a riot breaks out on the ground level of the station. I know—it's L.A., and riots probably break out all the time at police districts in shady parts of the city. Okay, so maybe Ryan can take the phone upstairs, to the detectives? He tries, but, for reasons unsatisfactory to anyone with a brain, he can't reach anyone.
Mooney (William H. Macy) works the phones at the police station
The detectives must have been raptured, so Ryan has to fill in for L.A. police department—at least until Sgt. Mooney (who in his entire career hadn't fired a gun) joins the pursuit. After Ryan learns that Jessica's captors are on the way to kidnap her son from his school, he rushes to rescue him, but fails. Then he must save an important piece of evidence that the bad guys are after and that the Martins have stored away. Even Jessica doesn't know what it is; she does know that once the abductors get it, they will kill her and her family.
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