Cellular (film)
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| Cellular | |
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| Directed by | David R. Ellis |
| Produced by | Dean Devlin, Lauren Lloyd |
| Written by | Larry Cohen story, Chris Morgan (screenplay) |
| Starring | Chris Evans Kim Basinger Jason Statham William H. Macy |
| Music by | Garrett Dutton, John Ottman |
| Distributed by | New Line Cinema |
| Release date(s) | September 10, 2004 |
| Running time | 94 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25,000,000 |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Cellular is a 2004 suspense thriller, directed by David R. Ellis and starring Kim Basinger and Chris Evans. The screenplay was written by Chris Morgan and Larry Cohen, the latter having also scripted Phone Booth, another movie that evolves from a phone call.
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[edit] Plot
Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) is a high school biology teacher kidnapped by mysterious assailants and imprisoned in an attic. Ethan (Jason Statham), later enters and smashes the only telephone in the attic to prevent her from contacting anyone. She has no idea who the kidnappers are and what they want.
Meanwhile, Ryan (Chris Evans) is at an amusement park trying to mend ways with his girlfriend Chloe (Jessica Biel) who dumped him because he was self-centered and irresponsible. He claims the opposite. To prove it he is given the task of distributing pamphlets by the evening.
Jessica, meanwhile tries to use the broken phone to randomly find a signal. She finds one … Ryan is driving when he receives a call. He answers only to find out that the caller is a woman called Jessica Martin who claims that she has been kidnapped and imprisoned and that she needs help. Ryan takes it as a joke at first, but she somehow persuades him to go to the police. Ryan reaches the police station and gives his phone to the first cop he finds who happens to veteran cop officer Mooney (William H. Macy ), but suddenly some prisoners create a disturbance, and Mooney tells Ryan to seek the robbery/homicide detectives on the fourth floor. As he ascends the stairs, he begins to lose the signal. Jessica becomes desperate and Ryan is unable to get to the R&B officers. He exits the station.
Meanwhile Ethan comes in to tell Jessica that he is going to get her husband and son too (Jessica always conceals the phone beneath a blanket to prevent Ethan from realizing that she is talking to Ryan). After he leaves, she tells Ryan to go to her son's school and get him before the kidnappers reach him. He is too late and her son, Ricky, is kidnapped. He follows them in the School's security personnel's car but loses them. Soon he discovers a gun in the glove compartment. His cell's battery is dying and he drives to a shop for a charger. After being repeatedly redirected from counter to counter, he exits the shop, comes back and at gun-point he obtains the device.
Mooney, meanwhile decides to check on the kidnapping case he received. He has been sharing his desire to retire with his friend Detective Jack Tanner (Noah Emmerich). Mooney uses the DMV records to find her address but when he comes to her house a woman answers him and tells him that she is Jessica and that she is fine.
Believing it to be a false alarm he leaves. But soon enough it is revealed that the woman in fact, is Dana Bayback (Valerie Cruz) an accomplice of the kidnappers. Meanwhile Ethan imprisons Ricky in the garage and threatens to kill him if Jessica does not tell him her husband's location. She tells him that he is at a bar in LAX. As he leaves she tells Ryan that they have gone to get his husband. Suddenly a cross-connection between phone lines threatens the carrier signal. The other one on the line is a lawyer who is telling his mother about his brand new Porsche. Ryan is able to find the lawyer and steal his car and phone, using the gun, since his phone was cut off from Jessica's by the lawyer's phone. He is able to resume contact. She tells him to head for LAX and find her husband. At the airport he's able to identify Jessica's kidnappers by her description and tries to stop them placing his gun quietly in one of the kidnapper's jacket. The airport's metal detectors pick up the gun. But to Ryan's surprise, the men turn out to be LAPD cops. He is able to reach a man wearing the same clothing as Jessica had described but it turns out to be the wrong guy. Craig Martin is also kidnapped.
On exiting the airport he finds that the lawyer's car has been impounded. Meanwhile a series of bizarre incidents have snaked its way into the news including the one about a gunman who took a mobile charger and overpaid for it too because the store was having a sale (It was Ryan). Mooney sees this news at his home and identifies Ryan. He calls Jessica's home and gets the voice mail instead, but this time he notices that Jessica's voice on the answering machine is very different from that of the woman who claimed to be her (Bayback).
Craig is brought into the attic and forced to reveal the location of a videotape. He tells them that it is at Centurion Bank in his locker but they will need him for clearance. Ethan and his friend Dmitri go with Craig while Deason stays. Ryan also reaches the bank tipped-off by Jessica. Once the kidnappers retrieve the video-camera, Ryan knocks down Dmitri, takes the camera and flees to the roof but he loses the cellphone when it falls off the roof. He manages to escape in a taxi-cab telling the driver to go near the LAPD Impound. In the cab he checks out the camera. He sees that Ethan and two other officers kill unarmed prisoners and another person is also revealed to be a part of the cold-blooded killings—Detective Jack Tanner. He gets the lawyer's car again and gets back his own cellphone relieved to find that Jessica's call is on hold.
Meanwhile Mooney returns to the Martin residence, but is shot at by Bayback. He retaliates and kills her. After she dies, he finds that she is a cop too. He calls for assistance.
Meanwhile Jessica tries to escape by killing Deason and driving away with her son, but Ethan arrives and stops her. Ryan, now deals directly with Ethan. He strikes a deal. The video in exchange for the Martin family. Ryan exhibits intelligence when he chooses the rendezvous for the deal.
The ultimate climax occurs at the Santa Monica Pier. Mooney realizes that Ethan and three others are the kidnappers. Ethan confronts Ryan in a boathouse and beats him up with his superior fighting skills until Mooney intervenes. After a brief cat and mouse game, Ryan helps Mooney to track down Ethan's location by calling on Ethan's cell phone. The ring of the cell betrays Ethan's hiding place and Mooney promptly shoots him dead. Later Tanner is also exposed and the Martin family is free. Jessica finally gets to meet the man who had used up the whole of his day trying to save her and her family.
[edit] Cast
| Actor/Actress | Role |
|---|---|
| Kim Basinger | Jessica Kate Martin |
| Chris Evans | Ryan |
| William H. Macy | Off. Bob Mooney |
| Jason Statham | Ethan |
| Noah Emmerich | Det. Jack Tanner |
| Eric Etebari | Dmitri |
| Matt McColm | Deason |
| Valerie Cruz | Dana Bayback |
| Richard Burgi | Craig Martin |
| Adam Taylor Gordon | Ricky Martin |
| Rick Hoffman | Lawyer |
| Eric Christian Olsen | Chad |
| Jessica Biel | Chloe |
| Will Beinbrink | LAX Cop |
[edit] Trivia
- Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber did uncredited rewrites of the script.
- On the 5 August 2004 edition of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Kim Basinger said that when she was talking on a cellular phone while standing outside a movie house bathroom waiting for a friend, she became very annoyed at the small, rude crowd that had gathered around to point and laugh at her. It was only after her friend exited the bathroom and pointed out that Basinger was standing directly in front of poster for Cellular that depicted her talking on a cellular phone did she understand why everyone was laughing at her.
- Larry Cohen worked on the script while he tried to get his screenplay Phone Booth sold. In a New Yorker article he says he wrote the film with the intention that it would be the direct opposite to Phone Booth (Phone Booth is about a man trapped on a phone in a booth, while this movie is about a man who is still trapped on a phone but can go anywhere). However, his friends told him that he had written the same screenplay twice.
- Several references to New Line Cinema (the financing studio) throughout the film:
- New Line Chairman Robert Shaye has a cameo as the irate man in the police station.
- Ricky's backpack displays the logo of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
- At the kidnappers' house, the New Line Cinema movie Final Destination 2 is playing on the television (directed by Cellular's director, David R. Ellis).
- Producer Dean Devlin has a cameo as the cab driver who drives Ryan.
- When Ryan is at LAX airport, you can hear the boarding call for "Flight 180 to Paris". That is the same plane that blew up in Final Destination, also from New Line Cinema.
- This film was set to be Dean Devlin's directorial debut, but he decided to produce instead.
- The phone Ryan is using is a Nokia 6600.
- Chris Evans performed his own car stunts. Before production began, he was trained for five weeks at a Los Angeles stunt school. Most of the other stunts are done by the actors themselves as well.
- The tattoo on Ryan's right arm is the Japanese character for "loyalty" and "honor," the defining heroic trait of this otherwise completely ordinary boy.
- The phone that Chris Evans used while filming did not actually function. However, he used an earpiece so he could hear Kim Basinger's lines during his scenes.
- A remix of the song "Sinnerman" by singer and pianist Nina Simone was used on the soundtrack of this film.
- Both Chris Evans and Eric Christian Olsen appear in Not Another Teen Movie.
[edit] Reactions
The overall reaction of the critics were lukewarm (only 54 % on the tomato-meter[1]). However, film critics Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper gave it "Two Thumbs Up!" On Ebert's review, he explains that there are so many ridiculous things, you'll just have to follow it and giving this film a 3.5/4 and saying "This is one of the year's best thrillers. Better than Phone Booth, for my money, and I liked that, too. Roeper called this film "[…] ingenious." The overall reaction of the audience were higher, a 6.5/10 [2].
[edit] Box office
This film made $56,051,920: $32,003,620 in the U.S. and $24,048,300 in the rest of the world. [3]
[edit] External links
