Cellular: Critic Reviews

Crosses the line between offering mindless entertainment and insulting our intelligence.

It's like the madly busy climax of an action film stretched out to feature length.

It's an honest, unpretentious, well-made B picture with a clever, silly premise, a handful of sly, unassuming performances and enough car chases, decent jokes and swervy plot complications to make the price of the ticket seem like a decent bargain.

I enjoyed every one of its 89 minutes.

Its adroit use of suspense makes you overlook the silliness.

A ludicrous little abduction thriller that boasts an entertaining cocktail of gunpowder, suspense, adrenaline, and cheese.

Buoyant, pleasantly pulpy, invigorating doodle.

There is nothing more to the movie than the usual thrills.

Logic has nothing to do with Cellular, but it's so quick-moving and fun we don't care.

Ellis crafts an impressive procession of car chases, fight scenes and things going boom. And he keeps things moving at such a rip-roaring pace that all the ways in which this movie just doesn't make any sense whatsoever blur into the background.

This is one of the year's best thrillers. Better than Phone Booth, for my money, and I liked that, too.

Another outlandishly cliched L.A.-set movie thriller -- high on action, low on sense.

A satisfying marriage of Hitchcockian suspense and brash B-movie energy.

Comes fully charged if just a little bit silly, a wham-bam action flick with no pretense and plenty of fun.

A tepid recycling of old film noir chestnuts.

Highly improbable, maniacally action-packed.

Ellis manages a few sudden shocks, but he and the editors never discovered the secret of ratcheting up suspense.

An absurdly concocted car chase and rescue operation predicated on the marvels of modern telecommunications.

Now you might think there'd be at least a few chills in such a dire predicament, but -- several car chases, a bunch of dirty cops and any number of bogus plot twists later -- you'd be proved wrong.

The picture has a low-stakes, cop-show vitality to it; it doesn't pretend to be more than the sum of its parts.

If thrills and spills like the ones in Cellular have been the stuff of melodrama since Pauline was tied to the tracks, mobile phones give a filmmaker more opportunities for cross-cutting and more weird hurdles to jump.

Using the clever premise, it packs a lot of thrills into a short space while keeping the level of tension consistently high.

What the film doesn't achieve is any real tension since a viewer is more caught up in how the movie is going to sustain the cell phone gimmick than in what happens to the hapless family.