The technology has been around since 1947, but common
public use didn’t begin until the 1980s. Now it has taken another two
decades for Hollywood to offer a thriller based on the cell phone. Cellular is a crackerjack
action film, and its plot could not have existed without this gadget. And
they say there is nothing new under the sun.
In this 2004 release, Jessica (Kim Basinger) is
kidnapped by a gang of thugs, led by the imposing Jason Statham, but she
has no idea why. She’s hardly helpless, and by fiddling with the
wires of a broken phone she manages to connect to a cell phone owned by
Ryan (Chris Evans). Once Ryan is convinced that Jessica’s desperate
pleas for help are genuine, he sets out on a monumental quest to find her,
performing daredevil stunts and breaking the law along the way. The plot
seems preposterous, but the filmmakers manage to keep it grounded in logic
most of the time. The plot has a few holes, but these are minor compared
with what could have gone wrong. Basinger spends most of the film in a
state of hysterics, but this ranks among her best performances. David R.
Ellis isn’t the first stuntman to become a film director, but he is
the first to make a good movie.
Stu (Colin Farrell) would have been better off if he
used his cell phone to secretly call his girlfriend; he could have avoided
being pinned down by a psychopathic sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) in
2002’s Phone Booth. He is such an arrogant weasel, lying to both his wife and his
girlfriend, that there are times you might side with the sniper. Stu is
caught between conflicting orders from the sniper and the police, who think
that he is the killer. Phone Booth is taut and concise, and the pacing is strong despite
its immobile protagonist.
Gadgets are generally the fodder of espionage films,
and Sneakers
(1992) is one of the overlooked gems of the genre. Robert Redford heads a
team of security experts (Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, Mary
McDonnell, and David Strathairn) who are hired by the government to steal a
computer program. Of course, things are never that simple, and the team
becomes the pursued. Sneakers is briskly paced, mixing thrills and humor. You
won’t find a more likable movie.
The real masterpiece of gadget movies is Francis
Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Gene Hackman stars as a surveillance expert who is
hired to record the conversation of a young couple as they walk through a
crowded plaza. The complex job is merely the setup; the tapes reveal a
possible murder plot. Few people saw the film when it was released, but its
themes of paranoia and the right to privacy should resonate more today as
Big Brother Homeland Security continues to constrict us.
DVDs scheduled for release Tuesday (April 5):Sideways, Elektra, Suspect, Spanglish, and
The Corporation.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2005.
