I hope that this review will serve as both an endorsement of the film as well as a warning to all those who are attending. If you’re a woman, a gay man, or hell even a straight man with some “unexplored tendencies,” the first 10 minutes or so of Cellular will go completely over your head because you will be unflinchingly staring at Chris Evans’ ridiculous body as he walks shirtless along the Santa Monica Pier. Thinking back I’m pretty sure there were some other people in that scene, in fact I think it might have been Eric Christian Olsen and possibly Jessica Biel for a minute or two, and I think there was some dialogue, but like I said, damned if I can recall anything other than his perfectly sculpted body that even Brad Pitt would be envious of.
On a more substantive note, Cellular is the story of a woman in peril (Kim Basinger) reaching out over the vast network of interpersonal communicators we call Cell Phones, trying to find someone who will take her pleas for help seriously enough to take action and save her family. Enter absurdly hot new comer Chris Evan’s character Ryan, who up until now has naturally never been able to follow through on anything in his life. (Obvious character trait? Perhaps, but let’s face it… it works.) Evans has to race against time and the innate rudeness and selfishness of his fellow man on a quest to find this woman before she and her family are killed.
While the action and chase sequences in the film are extremely well done and will definitely hold some surprises for the audience, some of the situations that Evans finds himself in do end up seeming a bit far fetched. For example, at one point he needs to charge his cell phone before the battery dies and he loses Jessica’s (Basinger) call, but when he enters the cell phone store, he finds nothing but rude clerks and ornery customers waiting in a never ending line. So, naturally, he pulls out a gun to skip ahead a few places before it’s too late. As your watching this happen you can’t help but let out a sigh of “ohh c’mon!!!” But when you consider what Michael Douglas did to a shop keeper who wanted to overcharge him for a can of soda in Falling Down, the fact that Evans would pull a gun on a pretentious cell phone clerk in order to cut through the bullshit and get that charger to save a woman’s life, it really makes perfect sense.
The fact is, if you want to pick this movie apart for inaccuracies and unbelievable plot points, you will have a field day yelling at the screen telling everyone what they “should” do. But, if you can sit back and enjoy the ride you might ...
