'Can you hear me now?' a character says during a scene in Cellular, a would-be thriller about a slacker twentysomething trying to assist a kidnapped woman whose voice comes pouring out of his cell phone as an average call becomes a matter of life and death. The line, which comes during a tense instant when the tenuous phone signal is in danger of being lost, is just one of many unintentionally amusing moments in the film. It's an overused commercial tag line delivered, much like the rest of the film, in a manner that leaves the audience wondering whether it should laugh along or simply wince. Ultimately, an intriguing idea is capsized by incompetent editing, acting, direction and script work, and only William H. Macy's presence keeps the movie from being something that should have gone straight to video.
Written by Larry Cohen, Cellular follows up previous thriller Phone Booth with another tale of death, deception and direct dialing. Unlike Booth, Cellular is a film whose unlikely plot machinations are exposed more and more each time the characters interact with some form of reality. Booth was a far-fetched movie, but since the main character stayed in his solitary box, there were few reminders of just how preposterous it really was; this time, dozens of characters need to be just as common-sense challenged as the star. We can only hope that when Cohen gets around to making Fax Machine: The Movie, he can piece his plot together a bit more effectively.
We can only hope that the roaming minutes are pretty cheap on the cell phone of Ryan (Chris Evans), an unmotivated Santa Monica beach bum hanging on the pier with his friends one summer day when his phone rings. After some initial mean-spirited skepticism that knocks him back two steps in the race to elicit audience sympathy, the young man eventually realizes that the woman caller named Jessica (Kim Basinger) is for real. Locked in an attic by a group of angry kidnappers, the woman doesn't know why her captors want her, or how long she has to live. After piecing together a forgotten, shattered phone, Jessica has reached Ryan and now they must work together to stop other kidnappings, figure out where she is, and determine why all this has happened.
Naturally, Ryan goes to the police first. There he meets Mooney (William H. Macy), a burnt-out cop with dreams of retiring and opening up a day spa with his wife. Intrigued by the phone story, he passes the kid on to a detective but an unlikely gang fight in the police station lobby (?) creates too much confusion for the police to assist. Meanwhile, a burly man named Greer (Jason Statham) keeps walking into the attic every few scenes, getting up close into Jessica's face, and slapping her around.
Cellular is not a complicated movie - guy on phone needs to find damsel in distress before she dies - but it does weigh itself down with a lot of complicated ideas. Police brutality, child abduction and armed robbery are all plot devices here, quickly used and discarded in service to the plot without any desire to deal with the baggage they carry. Need to get a cell phone charger? We all know that in a life and death emergency, we could grab one off a store shelf and walk out the door - but here our hero' needs to fire off live ammo in a crowded store. Policemen executing gang members in broad daylight, in the middle of a city street? As unlikely to happen as the remarkably smooth pans that the nervous citizen is able to pull off as he tapes the crime on his camcorder. Never let it be said that Larry Cohen let reality get in the way of a storyline.
That ethic carries over to director David R. Ellis, a stunt director who is so in over his head that even the stunts look bad. In scene after scene, Evans drives a car into oncoming traffic as we watch shots of cars turning, spinning, definitely about to make impact with the vehicle that is our point of view. Then we get the reaction shot of Evans looking back over his shoulder, exhaling deeply as he drives away without a scratch. Later in the film, a person lying on his side miraculously becomes airborne to shoot a bad guy in seemingly one move.
The technical aspects of the movie also have many irritating flaws, from an extra's deliberate movement in front of the camera (check out the scene with Macy asking Noah Emmerich's police captain a question outside their headquarters), to ridiculously blunt product placement to an absurd ease of parking spaces at places like the Santa Monica Pier, the film is constantly yanking you out of the story. When you do get into it, you'll find plenty more to distract you: why does Ryan take a security car at the school when his own vehicle is parked a few feet away? If Basinger's character is so traumatized by fatally wounding an assailant, why does she deliver a long, almost mocking explanation of what she's done? And why does Greer claim to not know what Ryan looks like after he saw him in the bank?
Cellular reaches a point, about twenty minutes in, when you realize the film has no intention to play fair. Unrealistic things happen to unrealistic people who make unrealistic choices, all while you're expected to somehow become emotionally involved and pretend that this story could be happening to you. At that point, you can either get angry or laugh, and there certainly is a lot here to laugh at.
Basinger comes across as both stiff and hilariously hysterical, which is some kind of major acting achievement, but probably not the one she was going for. Evans comes across as a blank slate, a vanilla hero who can't even portray the one emotion we would expect of him - disbelief that he's caught up in such an extraordinary situation. Statham does about as much stretching as a man trying to button his shirt, but his presence is still welcome.
The film's only true redemption is Macy, who somehow manages to carve out an interesting character amidst all this nonsense. The sight of Macy with a shaggy moustache and a face full of beauty mud is almost worth the price of admission, as is a tense shootout in the Martin homestead. Like Basinger and Evans, you often get the feeling that he's in a different movie that was shot on days when the other cast members weren't around. The difference is, his movie's pretty decent.
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