‘I’m really sorry about your family…’
It’s astonishing how little impact this movie had on its release back in 2016. This is a Stephen King adaptation starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson – reuniting the trio for the first time since the wildly successful 1408 a few years previously. And yet Tod Williams’ film barely left any kind of cultural footprint. It was loathed by critics which didn’t help. 11% on Rotten Tomatoes and an IMDB score of 4.4/10 don’t make for pretty reading…
When a mysterious cell phone signal causes everyone that hears it to go insane, graphic comic author Clay Riddell (Cusack) and Vietnam vet Tom McCourt (Jackson) team up to try and reach safety. The metaphor here is so overt it’s barely a metaphor at all. Cell phones are bad.
It’s difficult to explain why this movie doesn’t work. Let me count the ways. The performances are all over the place. Cusack and Sam Jackson are playing it straight but every character they encounter is ridiculously over-the-top and hysterical. Williams tries to pack too much into the skinny 98-minute running time and the result is a film that is frantically paced but also somehow quite dull. As ever, the dialogue that is lifted straight from the book works better on the page than it does on screen and Cell is too slight to contain any real emotional resonance. Cusack aside, I didn’t really care about any of these characters. The other issue is that aside from the eye-rollingly obvious central message of the film, the whole thing feels derivative. This is basically a poor man’s 28 Days Later with some groan-inducing social commentary about how phones are taking over our lives thrown in for good measure. In an age of Black Mirror, Westworld and Humans, this film felt old-fashioned even in 2016.
Despite all these flaws, I didn’t hate Cell. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as its reputation. But it’s not a good movie either. In the end, Williams and his cast take this perfectly serviceable novel and render it inert and irrelevant. Even Stephen King fans should miss this one.