The technothriller, which manifests itself mostly in
science fiction and the great action blockbusters, nicely suits both the style
and content of an era dominated by mechanism and ingenuity. Such films both
feed and stimulate the appetite of an apparently insatiable audience for ever
great quantities of shootouts, fireworks, car chases, and assorted
metamorphoses, all those special effects that many people mistake for cinema.
Because the art of film itself depends to an
extraordinary degree on the wonders of science and technology, the medium quite
naturally encourages constant innovations in its magic, ever more spectacular
demonstrations of its capacity to inspire wonder.
The new crime and suspense drama, Cellular, qualifies as an odd sort of
technothriller, a chase movie that employs one of the most common and certainly
the most portable of the everyday wonders the culture has come to expect, the
ubiquitous and versatile cellular telephone.
Whatever the plot and characters, the cell phone
occupies the intellectual and emotional center of the movie, displaying all its
up-to-date features, from call waiting to memory, to video camera capability,
which allow it to serve not only as an instrument of communication, but also
the source of action, the means of resolution, even the weapon of choice to
defeat the villains.
Cellular follows two parallel paths
of action that eventually intersect, and two major characters who communicate
throughout via the telephone, but only meet at the end of the picture. A
science teacher (Kim Basinger), kidnapped by a group of violent men, who kill
her housekeeper and later abduct her son and her husband, manages to fiddle
with the wires of a smashed telephone to make a frantic call, hoping to connect
with some number somewhere.
She ends up accidentally calling the cell phone of a
feckless surfer (Chris Evans) driving in the Southern California traffic, and
persuades him to go to the police. Since a melee at the precinct house
preoccupies all the cops, Evans sets out on his own to beat the gang to her
son’s school and follow them to Basinger.
That simple if rather implausible situation propels
a great deal of frenzied movement, landing Evans in a series of increasingly
complicated and dangerous pickles. Violating dozens of traffic laws, he speeds
to the son’s school, hoping to intercept the boy before the gang arrives,
steals a security guard’s car to follow them, holds up an electronics store to
get a charger for his phone so that he can stay in touch with Basinger, and
eventually carjacks a Porsche at gunpoint. The plot pushes him through a number
of other twists and turns at high velocity, and finally brings him to discover
the identity and motivation of the kidnappers.
Basinger’s increasing danger and desperation,
Evans’s mounting frustration as he copes with recalcitrant cops, traffic jams,
road accidents, and several close escapes from the villains, all the while
maintaining contact on the cell phone, imparts considerable emotional energy to
an already tense situation. The director heightens the tension with constant
crosscutting between the two characters, so that their respective perils
occasionally run parallel. He also thickens the texture by involving a stolid,
decent, somewhat comic police sergeant (William H. Macy) in the search for both
Evans and Basinger.
While keeping a breakneck pace by means of the
frantic pursuit and the various obstacles Evans encounters, the movie also
grounds its plot in a solid mystery. The identity and motive of the kidnapers
gradually emerge through the logic of the chase, which reveals almost
accidentally but entirely plausibly the reasons behind the crime. Considering
the recent history of law enforcement in Los Angeles, it hardly seems
surprising that the villains are rogue policemen with a special and desperate
agenda of their own.
The film reaches its climax in the hallowed space
below that venerable structure beloved of the private eye novels and films, the
Santa Monica Pier, where Evans once again demonstrates the versatility of his
cell phone, which turns out to be the perfect weapon to deceive, capture, and
defeat the criminals. The extraordinary technology of the everyday suggests a
new dimension to the technothriller — not a supercomputer, a robot, a
spaceship, or even some James Bond gimmick, but that remarkable little piece of
electronics so many people use and take for granted.
In a sense, Cellular updates those telephone thrillers of the past, applying contemporary ingenuity
to the tension of desperate communication, so that as in for example, films
like Sorry, Wrong Number, Dial M for Murder, and even the recent Phone Booth, the telephone itself
becomes the central subject, even the real character of the movie and a most
satisfactory one at that.
Cellular (PG-13), starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Eric Christian Olsen,
Jessica Biel, William H. Macy; directed by David R. Ellis. Cinemark Tinseltown;
Loews Webster; Pittsford Plaza Cinema; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal Eastview;
Regal Greece Ridge; Regal Henrietta.
This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2004.
