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The film is a mutated version of "Phone Booth" (Dir: Joel Schumacher, 2002) and "Paycheck" (Dir: John Woo, 2003). Told under a restricted narrative, the story embraces 3 almost parallel plots: (1) the kidnap of Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) and her family members by a gang and the gang's efforts to complete their devil mission; (2) Ryan (Chris Evans)'s duplicative attempts to save the hostages; and (3) Cop Mooney (William H. Macy)'s unintentional piece-meal investigation into the conspiracy. The plots of Jessica and Ryan are alternately shown under cross-editing. The 3 plot lines meet at the climax after which the resolution comes.

The film reuses the contrivance of the jeopardy of hanging up the phone (in "Phone Booth") but injects a new element of shifting locales. The hermeneutic code of the gang's identity and their motive together with the risk of loosing the phone connection at any time throughout the plots create a moderately powerful tension down the line. Yet tension diffuses under the proliferation of locale from singularity ("Phone Booth") to multiplicity ("Cellular"), making this film only secondary to its predecessor. This product also borrows the substances of perpetuating story causality from "Paycheck" in a way that the key protagonists resolve the problems step by step by using some emergent "tools" in face of danger (e.g., the pistol in Wyman School's security car, the battery charger, the lawyer's cell phone and his car, the address of the vehicle detention yard and … (check it out yourself)).

The film is fast pacing. No sooner after the expository sequence then the disequilibrium sets in. Thereafter intensive cross-cutting between Jessica's and Ryan's plots is used. Variant repetitions in narrative are adopted in the first half of the film as Ryan tries to intercept the actions of the gang (i.e., saving Jessica's son, her husband and preventing the stuff in the safe box from falling into the hand of the gang). This repetition serves to elongate the tension (similar to "Collateral" (Dir: Michael Mann, 2004)), particularly under the synergy of action and the risk of having the phone accidentally hanged up. Action wise, there are substantial portion of plot time alongside the classical Hollywood formulae of car-chasing and body fighting. The scenes are the concomitants of the genre but not outstanding. The second half of the film is told under an unrestricted narrative as the identity and motive of the bad guys are revealed. Since then, the film is no more than an ordinary cop movie.

The motive of the bad guys in the story is not convincing if their identities and their actions' consequences are taken into consideration. The viewership in Hong Kong is not satisfactory as the younger generation is not familiar with Kim Basinger who is put as the first listed actor in the film's ads. Basinger stages well by expressing her fear and mastering her intrinsic feeling oscillating between hopelessness and hopefulness. It is not a bad film in terms of entertainment value.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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