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| CELLULAR (2004)
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ReviewScore: 58 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
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 Although a cell phone may be the real star of Cellular, about a kidnapped woman who randomly calls a man on his cell phone, the film's performers, including Kim Basinger as the woman, Chris Evans as the man, Jason Statham as the leader of the kidnappers, and William H. Macy as a desk cop, are receiving plaudits from several critics for performances that lend credibility to a film that most of them portray as contrived. "The movie is skillfully plotted, halfway plausible and well acted; the craftsmanship is in the details, including the astonishing number of different ways in which a cell phone can be made to function -- both as a telephone, and as a plot device," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. A. O. Scott in the New York Times, while calling the plot "implausible," nevertheless describes the movie as "an honest, unpretentious, well-made B picture with a clever, silly premise, a handful of sly, unassuming performances and enough car chases, decent jokes and swervy plot complications to make the price of the ticket seem like a decent bargain." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post writes similarly: "There ought to be a small place in heaven for movies like Cellular. Now they almost never make them, but from the '30s through the '60s they were a Hollywood staple: efficient programmers, taut, tight killer B's, churned out in the hundreds, unstudied and unloved, but perfect on the undercard of a double feature, then gone forever in a week." John Anderson suggests in Newsday that Cellular shouldn't last that long, that the movie "is too inept to work as what it seems to be, and not clever enough to work as a spoof -- which, if you're feeling charitable, is what you assume they intended." And several critics, including Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune, Megan Lehmann in the New York Post, and Susan Walker in the Toronto Globe and Mail use the same term to disparage the movie: "Wrong number." |
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