REVIEWED - CELLULAR: When not churning out Lord of the Rings movies, New Line Pictures has, over the last few years, worked hard at perfecting a particular class of unpretentious, anarchically humorous B-movie thriller, writes Donald Clarke
Among the best of these was the hilarious Final Destination 2. That film's director, David R. Ellis, returns here with a wildly entertaining, if aneurism-inducingly improbable, high-concept movie which makes equally good use of a frightened Kim Basinger and the notoriously self-absorbed residents of LA's west side.
The story is credited to the prolific Larry Cohen and shares some features in common with the one he wrote for Joel Schumacher's rather less peppy Phone Booth. Ms Basinger, a science teacher (no, really), has just waved her son off to school when a gang of villains bursts through the door, shoots the cleaning lady and imprisons the heroine in the attic. They want something from her, but, with an unwillingness to ask the right question common to every character in Cellular, they won't clarify exactly what.
Before the bad guys bolt the door they smash up the phone, but Basinger - she's a science teacher, remember - manages to put enough bits of it together again to dial a number at random. She gets through to hunky Chris Evans (no, not that Chris Evans) on his mobile and begs for help.
The film then becomes taken up with a pretty successful attempt to divert our attention from many plot holes by doing increasingly ridiculous things to Evans and increasingly cruel ones to Basinger. Maybe, having to remain on the phone to Kim as he does, Evans can't phone the police himself, but why doesn't he ask somebody else to do so? Why does he never ask for her address? Who cares? So much fun is being had with the familiar irritations that accompany mobile phone use - bad reception, loss of battery power, fiddly volume control - that it becomes hard to care about the film's increasingly preposterous turns.
There is a great deal to be said for empty entertainments as efficient as this. Indeed, Cellular might just be the Oh hang on. I'm going into a tunnel.
