CELLULAR / PUSH

Dir. David R. Ellis US 2004

Dir. Paul McGuigan US 2009

Chris Evans is always enjoyable in everything he's in and I'm looking forward to seeing how he does playing Captain America next year. I decided to check out a pair of his movies that slipped through the cracks over the last few years; the gimmicky thriller Cellular and the sci-fi film Push. Neither of these were particularly good, but my expectations of which I would like better were inverted.

Cellular is one of those movies that really wants to be high-concept but is actually just a gimmick. Written by the screenwriter who brought us Phone Booth (what if he's still trapped on the phone...but now he can move around? Brilliant!), Cellular begins when Jessica Martin, a high school science teacher played by Kim Basinger (Jesus, could you imagine?) is kidnapped from her Brentwood home by a gang of armed men led by Jason Statham. After demanding information that she doesn't seem to possess, she is locked in an attic with a broken phone, which she somehow fixes (yeah, science!) and uses to connect with a random number. Said number belongs to Ryan (Chris Evans), a beach bumming twenty-something who has just broken up with his girlfriend (Jessica Bland, I mean, Biel. Sick burn.) over his extremely original commitment issues. After some convincing, Jessica is able to convince Ryan that she is in serious danger and soon has him running all over L.A. trying to save her husband and son while remaining one step of the badguys and dealing with all kinds of wacky phone related problems.

This movie was made in 2004 and the fact that it already seems kind of dated bodes well for its comedic value in the years to come. As you may have guessed by now, this film revolves around Ryans sweet new cell phone (a Nokia 6600 to be exact) which has all kinds of equally sweet features that are displayed in the first five minutes of the film. It can totally take pictures of some hot babes on the boardwalk and send them to Ryan's computer to be used as a screensaver AND it takes videos too! And if you think that these features will come into play in the third act of the film, you are officially smarter than Hollywood thinks you are. Congratulations.

Of course, given the premise, you should assume that you're signing up for both product placement and lots of crazy cell phone related tension. Battery running low! Watch Chris Evans rob a cell phone store at gunpoint after he's told to wait in line for a charger. Reception cutting out as he enters a tunnel! Watch Chris Evans reverse through oncoming traffic to avoid loosing the connection. Thank goodness for the coverage we have now or else we'd all be committing city-wide crime sprees to keep our calls from dropping.

Other than the ridiculousness of the premise (and the fact that Kim Basinger sleepwalks through what should be a fairly emotional role), this movie actually turned out to be a pretty fun ride. At 95 minutes, the pacing is tight, the plot kicking into gear with almost no set-up and never letting up. Evans is fun as the exasperated everyman and William H. Macy shows up as a cop who's about to retire and gets caught up in the action. That's always fun. He's too old for this shit! Plus, Jessica Biel is only in it for like, two seconds. I would say Jason Statham is wasted as the bad guy, but he plays it pretty much the same way he plays good guys, so it kind of works itself out.

If you need to kill an hour and a half, you could do a lot worse, especially given that David Ellis' two other most notable films are Final Destination 2 and 4. Better yet, have some kids, let them grow up, then watch it and start yelling about how back in your day, phones used chargers, not your own body heat and the pictures had to be sent to a computer, not directly to your brain. I have high/awesome hopes for the future, apparently.

Despite fairly crappy reviews, I had less than crappy expectations for Push, which had a pretty neat trailer and looked like a more badass version of Heroes (never has any show I wanted to be good been botched so badly. Fuck you, Tim Kring, fuck you). And while nothing could be as disappointing as Heroes, Push still managed to screw up more than it got right.

The premise (laid out in an extremely blunt voice-over at the beginning) revolves around Cold War experiments in which the government attempted to created an army of psychic soldiers with various powers. A generation later, the similarly powered children of these soldiers are on the run from a government organization called The Division, that wants to harness their powers for their own nefarious purposes. Nick Gant (Chris Evans) is a con artist living in Hong Kong who inherited his telekinetic abilities as a 'Mover' from his late father. He meets Cassie (Dakota Fanning), a 'Watcher' who's clairvoyance has told her that Nick will help her rescue her mother from The Division. This is further complicated by the arrival of Nick's ex-girlfriend Kira (Camille Belle), a 'Pusher' who can influence peoples thoughts and possesses a mysterious suitcase, the contents of which are very valuable, both to The Division and a super-powered Chinese crime family. Wow.

This film does do a few things right, so I'll discuss those first and not be mean. The look of this film is definitely interesting, combining jittery camera work and drab art direction of the Bourne films with the garishly colored lighting and slick direction of Hong Kong action movies. Setting a film featuring mostly American protagonists exclusively in Hong Kong gives the film a unique dynamic and lends a bit of authenticity to the idea that the characters are on the run from the government. Dakota Fanning is also a lot of fun as the snarky, fatalistic Cassie; most of the one-liners in the film end up being hers. The action (when there actually is some) is fairly clever and well-shot. There's a restaurant shoot-out about two-thirds of the way through in which neither person actually touches their guns, which is pretty nifty.

Other than that, unfortunately, this movie is a bit of a clusterfuck. You can probably boil down everything that's wrong with this film to the fact that it takes itself WAY too seriously. I specifically watched this movie to watch Chris Evans be a wiseass and his character is almost completely humorless in this film beyond his lovingly sarcastic relationship with Fanning's character. The movie thinks way too much of the emotional arcs and not nearly enough of the action scenes, a gross mistake given what the target audience of this film is looking to get out of it. The characters are all extremely thin and the emotional beats in the film are far to drawn out and protracted, featuring way too many overbearing musical choices and way too much on-the-nose dialogue. It's pretty clear that the writer was invested in the material and really wanted to create a believable world, but crammed into a two hour movie, it just seems like a mess. The shorthand terms for people with powers (Movers, Pushers, etc.) are kind of silly and the villains are way too generic to be threatening. Characters bounce in and out of the film for no reason other than to further the plot and by the third act the plot itself makes the terrible mistake of becoming too convoluted to easily follow but not interesting enough to make the effort. Blegh.

I don't think I can recommend either of these movies. It is odd that Cellular, despite being the less intersting film, ended up being more enjoyable. Not sure what's up next. I should be getting to the theatre this weekend, but I'm not sure what I'll end up seeing. Everything starts to pile up in the last three months of the year. Damn awards season.