Cellular
The Skinny: Kim Basinger plays a science teacher who’s held hostage by some bad guys. While being a captive, she manages to hack together a broken phone and make a phone call to some random guy, who risks his life for two hours to help her.
The Good: Good opening – the movie wastes about 3 minutes on story and then skips straight to the action. That action stretches every fiber of reality, but manages to gather up some decent momentum in the last third of the movie – at least enough to the point where you care a little how things turn out. And with all the crappy movies out these days, that’s about the best we can hope for, isn’t it?
Oh, and William H. Macy is fun to watch no matter how horrible the movie is. Without him, this movie would not have been good for much except toilet paper for really small animals.
The Bad: The acting – especially by Basinger – is oh-my-gosh horrible. She’s bad at acting like she’s in distress, and really bad at acting like she’s on the verge of crying. You just want to slap her. But it’s not all her fault – the writing is horrendous. For example, when Kimmy finally manages to get ahold of a stranger on her hacked phone, she yaps with him like she’s got all the time in the world. “Oh please mister…could you pull over to a police station and hand your phone to a police officer? Just give me 10 minutes of your time, please! Just 10 minutes!”
Who are they kidding? The phone call really would’ve gone like this: “My name is Jane Doe, and I’m being held hostage! For the sweet love of everything true and holy, get me the *bleep* out of here! Check your caller ID, then send the police to this number immediately! I’ll stay on the line as long as possible…thanks!”
The Ugly: The writers, who think we’ll believe that a snobby, self-centered frat boy would suddenly feel giving enough to steal cars, shoot guns and risk his life for a complete stranger.
The Bottom Line: This movie’s like a cell phone call that starts with a strong signal…then almost disconnects you. The signal then slowly gets better and better…only to be dropped completely.
Score: 
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2005 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.