If there's ever a book called How To Write A Bad Movie, here are a couple of rules that must make the list.
(1) In any given life-or-death situation with several possible courses of action, the protagonist must always pick the one least likely to be chosen by any sentient being.
(2) The script must always explain, preferably by the act of characters talking to themselves, things that are patently obvious to even the least observant moviegoer.
The cell-phone thriller Cellular hews to these rules in the face of all logic, as if determined to be as bad a movie as it can be. Written by Larry Cohen, the same guy who wrote Phone Booth (in fact the similarities were so strong he faced legal action for a while), it is that movie minus the tense and suffocating claustrophobia.
Kim Basinger plays Jessica Martin, a high school science teacher who, being rich like most teachers in the U.S. public school system, lives in a giant house in the tony Brentwood district in L.A. Okay, her husband is a realtor, so let's just say he's a really, really good one. In the movie's opening scene, several thugs enter her house and spirit her away. She's dumped in an attic where, to prevent her from calling out, one thug smashes the phone, leaving Ms Science to reassemble it.
Why didn't he just pull the phone out of the wall and take it away? Hey, if you start asking questions like that, I'll never finish this review.
Her hairpin surgery earns her one shot-in-the-dark phone call, which ends up on the cellphone of a preppie college kid named Ryan (Chris Evans) who, having just broken up with his girlfriend (Jessica Biel), is in no mood for pranks. Initially skeptical, Ryan is finally convinced to do the first and last logical thing in the movie -- go to the police.
Unfortunately, there's a bit of a wait there, so he does what you or I would also do if faced with a crime committed by desperate violent psychopaths -- he takes the law into his own hands. This even BEFORE he finds out that certain L.A. cops are not to be trusted (duh).
There's a stolen car, wrong-way chases down various L.A. freeways, some ass-kickery, and he robs a cellphone store at gunpoint to get a charger for his dying battery.
And Kim? She directs the action over the phone -- attempting to thwart the kidnapping of her son and husband -- while doing her best hyperventilating woman-in-peril impression. Meanwhile, William H. Macy plays the movie's one good cop, a soon-to-retire police desk jockey who suddenly gets his chance to go Dirty Harry. What do you know? Never having pulled a gun in his life, he's able to roll on the floor and nail a perp while spinning, just like cops do in the movies!
Belief... getting... too hard... to suspend... can't... hang on...
(This film is rated 14-A)
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