A True Case Of Life And Death

The Sunday Age

Sunday February 6, 2005

Tom Ryan

Film review: CELLULAR **** (M, 94 minutes) On general release from Thursday

Aside from me, just about everyone seems to be wielding a mobile phone these days. Regular readers of Michael Shmith's columns over the years will be well aware of the risks they take when they use them in public places: not only in theatres, cinemas and restaurants, but behind the wheel of a car (I'm with the columnist formerly known as Groucho there: I'd jail the schmucks on the spot).

On the screen, however, it's a different matter altogether. Ryan (Chris Evans), the young layabout driver-hero of Cellular, hurtles around the streets of Los Angeles like a madman, talking all the while on his mobile, and clearly being very distracted by the conversation he's having. Those hauled over by the police in similar circumstances will always have a good reason for breaking the law ("I was just. . ."), but Ryan really does. It's a matter of life and death.

Brentwood resident Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) has been abducted from her home and imprisoned in an attic somewhere outside the city. The wall phone there has been sledge-hammered to bits by the leader of those responsible (Jason Statham), but the resourceful captive has managed to use the surviving wires to dial a number at random: Ryan's.

It's worth noting the film's subversive message here: that while mobiles are essentially throwaway junk, you can never really destroy the old-fashioned telephones with their much more reliable landline links. Later in the film, at a crucial moment, Ryan drops the mobile he's carrying - from a height of only a couple of storeys - and it shatters into fragments. Obviously totally beyond repair.

This is truly a film to warm my aforementioned esteemed colleague's heart because almost everyone carrying a mobile phone in it is a self-centred ratbag, immersed in his or her own world, totally oblivious to the needs of others. This includes Ryan at the start, where he's being berated by his girlfriend Chloe (Jessica Biel) for never being willing to do anything for anyone else. When the kidnapped Jessica gets him on the phone, his initial refusal to take her seriously lends persuasive support to Chloe's view of him.

Cellular rips right along as Ryan races against time, its carefully calibrated momentum sweeping you right along with it. And time is of the essence. Since mobile phones run on batteries, they can't be relied on for extended conversations either. As a result, Ryan finds himself wasting precious minutes trying to explain to the snooty people behind the counter at a phone shop that he's in urgent need of a charger.

Just as Joel Schumacher's 1993 thriller Falling Down puts one inside the everyday urban nightmare as Michael Douglas loses his cool and embarks on a rampage across Los Angeles, Cellular presents a litany of the kinds of things that drive one crazy in a big city: people who think they own the road, or who believe their time is always more important than yours, or who simply don't care. Those smiled upon here are the ones prepared to step out of their cocoons and offer assistance, such as Ryan and the nice-guy cop (William H. Macy) who eventually becomes involved.

Genuinely suspenseful, directed with high-octane efficiency by David R. Ellis, Cellular is guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. It's based on yet another wonderfully simple premise conjured up by Larry Cohen, the esteemed B-movie director whose work in the 1970s marks a golden period (with films such as It's Alive!, It Lives Again, God Told Me To and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover). Cohen also wrote the screenplay for Schumacher's Phone Booth (2002), a hang-up-and-you're-dead! thriller that has more than a little in common with this one.

back story

Before the mobile phone came along to set the stage for Cellular and to provide the villains in the recent Manchurian Candidate remake with a means of triggering their hypnotic spells, old-fashioned landlines played their part in the movies too. Barbara Stanwyck won an Oscar for her role in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) as a woman who overhears a murder plot on the phone and then realises she's the intended victim. Alfred Hitchcock's 3-D thriller Dial M for Murder (1954) has Ray Milland betraying his wife (Grace Kelly) with a phone call. Rock Hudson and Doris Day establish a relationship on a party line in the smartly written sex comedy Pillow Talk (1959), which is a bit like the 1998 email romance You've Got Mail in reverse. In Sydney Pollack's directorial debut, The Slender Thread (1965), Sidney Poitier's crisis-call volunteer has to keep would-be suicide Anne Bancroft on the line while the police try to trace the call. Answering the phone in the 1998 Japanese film Ring, or its 2002 US remake, is a death sentence. The same awaits Colin Farrell if he hangs up in Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth (1998), pictured.

© 2005 The Sunday Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home