"Cellular"

It may not push all the right buttons, but somehow this thriller starring Kim Basinger and William H. Macy manages to get through.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sep 10, 2004 | Few people seem to know how to make thrillers anymore, a shortage that has served Hollywood increasingly well. Once in a while there's a surprise -- Paul Greengrass' exhilarating, grown-up "Bourne Supremacy," for example.

More often, though, our standards beaten down with a big stick, we slink toward the multiplex on a Saturday night, figuring that one thriller might be slightly superior to the other ("Suspect Zero" over "Wicker Park"?) but suspecting, deep down, that in the long run they're pretty much the same creature wearing slightly different overcoats. Still, we lay down our ticket money because, face it -- sometimes only a thriller will do.

If only because our expectations have been ground to a dull nub, David R. Ellis' "Cellular" offers a small semicircle of hope. Kim Basinger plays Jessica, a well-heeled Brentwood biology teacher who's kidnapped by a gang of baddies led by a grim thug named Ethan (Jason Statham). They're after her son next, and they're getting ready to nab him when he's let out of school.

After tossing Jessica into a locked attic, in a house whose location is of course a mystery to her, Ethan takes note of an old-fashioned phone mounted on a post in her little prison and smashes it with a giant mallet (a mallet that Jessica momentarily believes, as we do, to be meant for her head). After he leaves, Jessica notices that the phone's busted-up parts are still emitting faint blips and bleeps. Resourcefully, she tippety-taps a few wires together until she manages to reach a random cellphone number -- that of a good-looking, ambitiously aimless beach bum named Ryan (Chris Evans, of "The Perfect Score").

In a desperate, tattered whisper, Jessica begs for his help. At first, Ryan tries to brush her off as a joke: "This has been fun, but now you're wasting my minutes." But his decency gets the better of him, and as the danger Jessica faces becomes clearer to him, he tries ever more desperately to help her -- without losing the connection.

"Cellular" is based on a story by exploitation-movie eminence Larry Cohen, most recently the writer of "Phone Booth" and, much further back, the creator of an almost-legendary 1960s summer-replacement show called "Coronet Blue," which featured an amnesia plot that never resolved itself, causing untold numbers of TV-obsessed kids to grow up wondering if the show actually existed or they'd dreamed it all up.

What's remarkable about "Cellular" -- Chris Morgan wrote the screenplay -- is that it doesn't exhaust the novelty of its idea in the first 20 minutes. The predicaments it invents for Ryan are almost dazzlingly pedestrian: Cut off by a bus! Cellphone battery running low! Surrounded by a gaggle of schoolboys dressed identically -- which one is Jessica's son? Ryan meets every challenge inventively, particularly the threat of the pooped-out cellphone: Frustrated that he can't get immediate service in a cellphone store, he brandishes a tiny pistol he's found and demands in a high, pinched voice, "Now listen, give me that goddamn charger!"

Next Page: Bill Macy's meaningful exchange with a goldfish

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