Cellular
Just another high concept 2 hours-long commercial, featuring kidnapping and dozens of dead mooks.
No brand goes unmentioned. Porsche®, Ford®, Nokia® (too much), Home Depot®. Even the handguns get all the close-ups. The film skimps on characterisation, but object porn abounds.
The plot is completely hardcore, but the film treats with an appalling lightness, with humorous quips randomly sprinkled. Dirty cops murder civilians execution style in broad day light, take their money and go after a witness with hard evidence. The wife (a high school teacher) gets stuck in an attic with a smashed rotary phone, jury rigs it and calls random numbers until a guy in Santa Monica picks up on his Nokia® cellphone. The kidnappers wreck havoc around LA trying to find that kid but get defeated in the end by the good guys, William H. Macy playing the cop from Fargo, ironically.
Apparently this is a spiritual sequel to Phone Booth, but unlike that intense thriller this is just a standard Hollywood flick used to peddle more junk.
Directed by a stuntman from Scarface, there’s a lot of actors you will recognise from future films.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.