Cell (2016)

Cell (2016)

Dir. Tod Williams

Written by Stephen King, Adam Alleca

Starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Isabelle Fuhrman, and Stacy Keach

This poster actually makes the movie look kind of fun (though beware anything quoting a review with the attribution too small to see which raves "A refreshing throwback") but don't get your hopes up...

...This one is more indicative of the actual level of quality you'll be getting.

CELL does not come with a backstory that would particularly inspire confidence. First announced in 2006 as Eli Roth’s follow-up to HOSTEL 2, Roth split with the studio over creative differences, the script was re-written at least once --eventually by King himself-- and it seems to have passed from producer to producer before finally signing up stars Cusack and Jackson and going into production, as near as I can tell, sometime around 2012 or 2013, after more than half a decade in development hell. According to the predictably unsourced trivia on IMBD, the film seems to have been finished in 2013, because it was being sold as a property at Cannes that year, apparently to such complete disinterest that it received not a single bid. By 2015, another distributor had picked it up, but a string of disastrous losses left them also unable to distribute it, and it sat in limbo for another year before Saban films finally decided to put it out of its misery and dump it direct-to-VOD this year (or, as the IMDB trivia, possibly written by someone involved with the film, overgenerously characterizes it: “Enter Saban Films, the same company who swooped in to save Rob Zombie's 31 (2016), did [sic] the same for Cell on March 31st. Saban's marketing campaign revved up in April 2016, revealing the first official poster and trailer on April 26th as well as US theatrical release!”). But come on IMBD trivia section, there’s no way to spin this that can hide the fact that a Stephen King-scripted adaptation of a bestseller starring Cusack and Jackson would have gotten a real release if it was even marginally non-embarrassing.   

Given all that, this is somewhat closer to a real movie than I had pessimistically assumed, making it perhaps the only thing that happened in 2016 which turned out somewhat better than I had anticipated, instead of terrifyingly worse than I could have possibly imagined. I mean, it’s still 2016 so it’s not good or anything, or even remotely close to good, but it does in some small ways resemble a movie that you could watch and, if not enjoy, at least not feel like you’d been recklessly taken advantage of. The two stars are in it for pretty much the whole thing instead of just one or two useless scenes so they could stick their faces on the poster, for example, which was by no means a given. It has some helicopter shots and set pieces and stuff. Stacy Keach (six-time Academy-Award Nominee NEBRASKA, and also CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666: ISAAC’S RETURN) is in it.

Alas, while it’s better than it might have been, it falls squarely into that dead zone of being not good enough to really be good, but not bad enough to be interesting. It’s unexceptional in every possible way, which is ultimately a far worse sin than just being incompetent.

The mediocrity starts with its simple scenario --which is a polite way of saying, “it’s pretty much the exact same movie as every other fucking zombie movie since 28 DAYS LATER”-- where an evil cell phone tone turns people into murderous zombie death machines (the running kind, which would have been old hat even in 2006, let alone 2016), and our scattered band of rag-tag heroes have to try and survive while they go on a cross-country trek to a place they think maybe John Cusack’s adorable son might still be alive. I guess the twist is they can’t use their cell phones because then they’d become zombies. Truly, a tale of terror ripped from today’s headlines.

This is all fine as far as it goes; the zombie stuff is uninspired but adequate enough. The death blow is that it’s ugly and looks like it was shot on a cellphone by a swaying drunk. A DESPERATE PLEA TO FUTURE FILMMAKERS: BUY A TRIPOD. TURNING EVERY SHOT INTO A UNINTELLIGIBLE BLUR DOES NOT MAKE ANYTHING MORE REALISTIC. Does your head sway around like this when you’re looking at people? Do your home videos look like they were shot by a tourette's patient who’s spent the last week consuming nothing but vodka and amphetamines? Hell, even the shittiest youtube cam-phone video is steadier than this. BUY A TRIPOD. Or fuck, tie the camera to a chicken. This madness needs to end. (Some real lighting would probably help too.)

The magic of cinema

I know what you’re about to say, “They’re going for naturalism!” But why bother in a movie about (spoiler) an alien zombie cellphone prophecy conspiracy? Embrace the absurdity and learn to have a little fun, guys. Why constrain yourself to anything as gauche as reality when the premise is inherently this daffy? It just means your horror film looks dull and lacks any possibility of atmosphere. It also means it looks noticeably cheaper and chintzier even than it actually must have been. Long portions look about on par with your average SyFy channel original movie, but that can’t be right, can it? There’s some extremely dodgy CG which makes it seem like the movie must have been made for almost nothing, but then again there are also a couple of larger scale setpiece scenes which suggest there was at least a little budget at some point. And come on, the presence of Cusack and Jackson and the screenplay by King still means that someone must have spent a little money on this, right? Right?

If there ever was any money, though, it didn’t end up on screen. Most of the zombie action is as low-effort as these things come, mostly a handful of indifferently made up shufflers running around without anything especially interesting to do (although one zombie eats a dog, that’s fun). The vast, vast majority of the movie is just one or two shabbily dressed actors in natural lighting walking around the woods or in some nondescript room. Fortunately, there are maybe two or three setpieces involving zombies acting weird (sleeping together in a stadium, wandering in a circular holding pattern) that are unique enough images to make it not completely empty of value. Just mostly. It’s at its best when it finds this sort of bizarre gimmick and makes some use of the worthless “cell” concept, but unfortunately that’s a pretty small sliver of runtime. Most of the time it’s just a particularly dour and ugly-looking zombie apocalypse movie with no good zombies or memorable zombie sequences.

Gripping stuff.

The cast isn’t much better-served than the zombies are. Cusack and Jackson are more fun to watch than most actors would be, but I also can’t help but notice that neither really has anything fun or distinctive to do, and considering how much of the movie is spent NOT getting attacked by zombies, we never really learn much about them or establish anything about their relationship either, they mostly just discuss the plot in the grimmest possible manner. CELL is hardly the first movie to waste good actors on boring roles, but again, it just really raises the question of what was supposed to be the good part, here? Cusack does manage to slip a few dry chuckles in there but it’s not enough to turn things around. Stacy Keach gets far and away the most memorable role in the movie, and that’s only because he gets to shoot a flaming arrow. OK, you got me, that’s a good part. But it’s impossible to notice that STAKE LAND, which had to be shot for less and with a less distinguished cast and no Stephen King script, does vastly, vastly more with the same basic setup. There’ just not a lot of evidence on-screen that director Tod Williams had any particular ideas as to why this would be entertaining enough to put on screen most of the time.

That adds up to a powerfully listless experience, and it wouldn’t even have been especially hard to save; a stupid but obvious direction would have been to use the “cell phones drive people crazy” gimmick as a somewhat dated poke against an over-connected modern world. It’s so obvious that multiple reviews of the film even claim that it does make this point, but I’m here to tell you it definitively does not. Maybe the book does, i don’t know. But there’s absolutely nothing in the film which would make you think Williams had considered this idea. It’s a pretty dumb, lazy premise anyway, but I can’t help but think a better director would have at least been able to squeeze something out of it.  

Williams was known for well-received offbeat indie dramedies THE ADVENTURES OF SEBASTIAN COLE and THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR in the late 90’s and early 00’s, before taking a sudden left turn into horror with PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 in 2010, but there’s not really any evidence of his unusual career path here, either. This just seems like the work of a thoroughly perfunctory contractual obligation. He has been married to both Famke Janssen and Gretchen Mol during both their prime hotness years, though (not at the same time), so I guess he must be doing something right somewhere. But this ain’t it. This ain’t really anything. It’s a movie that sits there staring back at you, hoping you have some idea what you’re both doing there. Sorry CELL, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Something something, joke about reception. See what I did there, that's me trying just about as hard as this movie does.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	When Everyone Is Connected No One Is Safe and Fear Your Phone
TITLE ACCURACY	It is sort of about cell phones, I guess. It’s the title of the book, anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the Stephen King novel by the same name (co-written by the man himself!)
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombie (running variery)
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Cusack, Jackson
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen King. Stacy Keach?
NUDITY?	None, which is weird because you’d usually get at least one naked zombie in there.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	There’s one turncoat dog who helps the zombies out by acting all cool around them and making our boys think everything’s chill. But he doesn’t attack, he flees like the coward and traitor that he is.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombie (?)
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	It’s pretty unclear what’s going on but there’s talk of a prophecy and stuff
MADNESS?	Yeah, it’s kinda halfway between zombies and THE CRAZIES
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Eh, not really
VOYEURISM?	It’s implied that the “hive” is watching our heroes somehow
MORAL OF THE STORY	Guys this may come as a huge surprise to you but not all Stephen King adaptations turn out to be good movies.

The Frozen Ground

The Frozen Ground (2013)

Dir. and written by Scott Walker (no, not that Scott Walker. No, not that one either.)

Starring Nicholas Cage, John Cusack, Vanessa Hudgens, Radha Mitchell, 50 Cent

Oh, poor John Cusack. He wants to make a good crime film so badly. I mean, let’s look, he’s done THE ICE HARVEST (2005), THE CONTRACT (2006), WAR INC (2008), THE FACTORY (2011), THE RAVEN (2012), this one in 2013, GRAND PIANO (also 2013), THE BAG MAN (2014), the hilariously named DRIVE HARD (2014), and THE PRINCE (2014). That's almost one attempt per year every year since 2005, and what does he have to show for it? A couple interesting failures, a lot of dismal failures, and two decent movies (ICE HARVEST and GRAND PIANO almost a decade apart). I’m not sure what it is about the poor guy, he always seems to be trying so hard (at least as hard as his driving, I bet), but for whatever reason he can’t seem to star in a decent crime film to save his life. I bet he and Gabriel Byrne hang out and commiserate. And they’ll have to drink to this one too, because alas, despite the promising cast this one has to be filed solidly in the “dismal failure” pile.

It brings me no joy to say that, because I’m always rooting for these things to be good. I’m exactly the kind of person who would enjoy this sort of debacle. But Jesus, John, you gotta give me something to work with. By which I mean, you gotta start picking a few projects that give you something to work with. Just like THE FACTORY, this one isn’t outright incompetent enough to be amusing, it’s just dour and dull, focusing on every single one of the least interesting aspects of the story and barely even remembering that it’s supposed to be a serial killer flick most of the time. Instead it’s kind of an unfocused Alaskan misery-porn about one of the killer’s ex-victims and the standard-issue over-the-line detective trying to solve the case.

Now you’d think casting Nicholas Cage as an over-the-line detective would automatically be great. But seriously, is there really any more greatness to be wrung out of this particular lemon, even if you squeeze as hard as Cage can? Obviously, there is no cliche in the book older than the over-the-line detective, and just to make certain we’re never less than 100% aware of that fact, they must have made sure to literally check off a list of all possible cliches. He’s an over-the-line detective, check. His bosses are mad at him, check. He’s two weeks away from retirement, check. He has a bitchy wife (poor Radha Mitchell) who doesn’t understand why he’s so awesome and constantly complains that he works too hard for justice and why can’t he just spend more time at home and not worry so much about catching this serial killing rapist, check. He makes a big bulletin board with photos of victims and thread connecting them, check. He has a troubled past and a tragically killed family member’s photograph in his wallet, check. Despite his gruff ways, he has to protect a wayward child who eventually wins him over, check. He’s paired with a mismatched wacky ethnic partner (George Lopez) who drives him crazy but the two eventually bond and solve a mystery, check. OK maybe not that last one, but I guarantee they considered it.

Movie detectives spend a lot of time doing this.

Nic Cage is still Nic Cage, so it’s always fun to watch him, but he’s pretty dialed back here. My memory of this movie is already fading fast, but IIRC he never punches a woman while wearing a bear costume, for example, which is really something that could have spiced this up a bit. I think that should be his signature thing from now on, like Arnold’s “I’ll be back.” Alas, no such luck here. He gives a perfectly fine performance, unfortunately the script simply doesn’t give him any opportunities to do anything interesting whatsoever. I mean, like Cusack’s extraneous detective character in THE FACTORY, all Cage does here is piece together things the audience already knows, and the process by which he pieces it together is so dishearteningly rote that there’s just no narrative arc at all. In fact, he correctly figures out who the villain is within the first 15 minutes, and the rest of the movie is mostly him talking to various tangentially related characters trying to find a little more physical evidence to use against the guy, and in the end (SPOILER) it turns out that A) he doesn’t really find anything incriminating and B) it doesn’t matter anyway (SPOILER).

Police procedurals are actually a pretty tough thing to get right, I think. Seems like it should be a great way to structure a gripping story, right? There’s a built-in mystery, a clear objective, an obvious protagonist and villain and a lot at stake. But actual investigations aren’t really clear-cut stories. They’re messy, they involve a lot of dead ends, false starts, and more than anything else, they involve a lot of meticulous, mostly unhelpful detail work. You can show that in a movie, but unless you’re a real master it’s just not all that cinematic. There’s a lot of reading involved, which is always death for a movie. It’s the kind of thing that can be interesting with the right details but man, you’re really gonna have to come up with some good details. And FROZEN GROUND unambiguously does not. How does he figure out who the culprit is? Someone tells him, right at the start. There’s not much cat-and-mouse here, not a lot of discovery. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on, so the only thing the movie has left to show us is how Detective John Frozen* figures out what the killer (Cusack as Det. Billy Ground**) is up to. Except that he never really learns anything relevant anyway, and we already know because we’ve been watching it happen since frame one. Come on Det. Frozen, catch up with us here, we’ve moved on. I mean, what’s the fun in watching someone else try to put together a puzzle you’ve already solved?

Deleted scene from COFFEE AND CIGARETTES.

I suppose they might have been able to milk some tension out of the agonizing process of sifting through mundane clues even though we already know the outcome, if there was some kind of ticking-timebomb scenario. Balance the tension of slow progress against the compelling need for immediate action. But as it is, just like THE FACTORY this one inexplicably avoids making it a race against time. If there’s not enough evidence to arrest the killer today, tomorrow will be fine, too. Someday in the vague future he’ll probably kill again, unless he doesn’t, but we know that as of right now he doesn’t seem to have any particular concrete plans to harm anyone. So there’s no particular reason to rush on this. Maybe Cage’s whiny wife has a point about working too hard.

That just leaves the whole thing totally narratively slack. There’s no mystery, no immediate peril and no particular interpersonal drama, so a curious lack of urgency pervades the whole thing. This seems like the least interesting part of a story which is otherwise pretty crazy, right? I mean, without any of that stuff, what exactly are we even watching here? The only answer the movie can come up with is that we’re watching one of the killer’s former victims (who he raped but failed to murder) sort of drift around, look for a job, talk about her fucked up family, smoke meth, strip, and hang out with a bunch of junkies and pimps. What is this, a sequel to BAD LIEUTENANT? I guess maybe there could have been a way to squeeze some human drama out of this situation, with this poor teenage girl who’s been fucked over so badly by life given a chance to help Det. Frozen catch one of the many guys who has treated her poorly throughout her short life. But first of all, she doesn’t really have much to contribute to the investigation, secondly, she doesn’t really do anything but kind of drift around listlessly getting into one depressing but mundane shitty situation after another, and third… well, I’ll try to be delicate here but there’s really no nice way of saying this… she’s played by Vanessa Hudgens.

I’m sure Hudgy Bear means well, and she sure tries hard here, crying, swearing, smoking, stripping, etc. But man, if there is an actress who could convincingly play this emotionally damaged, chain-smoking meth-addled teenage runaway hooker from the wrong side of the tracks, Hudgy ain’t her. I’m sorry, but putting some Green Day mascara on a HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL star does not translate to “dark and edgy” as well as the filmmakers here appear to believe it does. There’s exactly zero that rings true about this performance, which obviously isn’t really assisted by the cheeseball tough girl dialogue, either. If writer/director Scott Walker has spent any time with teenage hookers recently, he obviously hasn’t been listening very carefully to how they (or any actual humans) talk. He does, however, feel it necessary to indulge in an extremely uncomfortable leering striptease scene, so you’ve got a real sexy music video of this drugged up teenage runaway rape victim to look forward to. Classy move, FROZEN GROUND.

Writer Scott Walker struggled for weeks with the script, it just wasn't working. Then suddenly, a thought occurred. "Of Course!" he shouted, leaping from his chair. "Strip scene! How could I be so blind!?"

The movie does seem to draw the line at showing this prostitute, you know, work as a prostitute, so it seems a little weird that she’s hanging around her pimp so much. Fortunately, that would be FROZEN GROUND producer/video game character 50 “Curtis Jackson” Cent, so all is not lost. Mr. Cent rewards your attention by intriguingly portraying what may be the wussiest pimp ever committed to celluloid; he dresses pretty fly, and has Superfly’s slicked-back straightened hair, but he’s just a total weiner who’s constantly getting pushed around by everyone. It’s actually kind of a good, natural performance, and he seems a lot more like a real person than most of the main characters, believably pathetic for a small-town loser. But it’s also a totally uncharismatic and therefore uninteresting role and since he’s the producer he also gets a meandering and totally unnecessary expository subplot, so no net gain there, either.

You may think that's a pretty pimpin' coat, but remember, it's Alaska. Everyone has one. Purely practical.

If there is any reason at all to watch this (and there isn’t really) it’s gotta be Cusack himself, finally actually cast as the killer as I specifically requested in my FACTORY review. Looks like I was right, he’s a natural at this, playing a low-key but scary killer with a terrific internal intensity. He’s totally believable as a monster with a normal guy’s face; he seems off-putting and a little creepy, but not so much that you’d suspect him of his real hobby. See, turns out our man Billy Ground is a hunter, and his prey is the most dangerous game of all: scared, abused hookers who he flies out to the wilderness in his private plane so he can have them limp like 20 feet into the woods and then shoot them. What an asshole. Total Dick Cheney move, there. If that sounds like a ridiculous, perhaps even insipid, gimmick for a serial killer movie... guess what: that’s actually a genuine true part of this questionable true story. This fucking world, amiright?

So that’s pretty shocking, but in a movie this full of artifice it seems so completely outrageous as to inspire some unintentional humor. The movie, apparently realizing this, seems to include it almost apologetically, playing it way, way down and acting as if it’s not that big a deal. Unfortunately it’s the only interesting, unique thing that happens in the whole runtime, and as such is pretty much the only reason to make this movie in the first place. So they probably ought to have just gone ahead and made it into a crazy setpiece, at least got something entertaining out of it. What’s that you say, it would be sleazy and despicable to turn the real-life torture and death of these poor women into crazy, over-the-top fun for our amusement? I agree, but come on bud, that’s the whole point of making these true-life crime thrillers in the first place. I mean, the only reason this story is even remotely worth telling is that we’re morbidly interested in the mentality of serial killers. If you think that’s macabre or reprehensibly glorifying the killer, well, you might not be wrong about that, but how about you don’t make a serial killer movie, then? What, if we act all depressing and grim, it makes it OK to crank out a movie about this lowlife murderer filled with big hollywood stars? If it’s dull enough, we can pretend this isn’t a naked attempt at a cash grab using real-life headlines like a superhero franchise property?

Yes, he rapes and murders women for sport, but his pro-second Amendment attitude towards open carry still makes him an attractive candidate for the Alaska Tea Party. Look, politics is all about compromise.

Fie on that, I say. I’ll accept sleaze in exchange for entertainment. What I can’t really accept is dull, grim anti-narratives which still exploit people’s suffering but self-consciously try not to entertain you to make up for it. There’s certainly a way to make a good true-life crime thriller, ie ZODIAC or my personal favorite, CITIZEN X. But basically, they’d have to either be a lot more interesting or a lot more crazy than this one. And it’s a shame, because at the very end, finally, finally, when Cage and Cusack actually meet, things start to heat up a little, people start spiraling towards mega-acting, things start to look up for the movie… and then it just abruptly ends with a goofy duex ex machina so cliched you almost can’t believe it. Seriously, when it happened I kept waiting for a twist or something, thinking there’s no way they’d actually go for something so lazy and they were just trying to trick us into thinking things were resolved. But nope. At least THE FACTORY had a suitably laughable twist; this one just sort of stumbles to a halt, right as it was starting to get good. Shame, that.

So alas, at the end of the day THE FROZEN GROUND is an absolutely disposable paint-by-numbers with a much better cast than it deserves but absolutely nothing to offer in terms of a story or even any parts which are particularly memorable or unique or compelling or interesting, or anything you would ever watch and then remember at a point later in linear time. The movie’s discomfort with exploiting the real murders or glorifying the killer ensures that instead, it sulkily avoids anything interesting about its premise and resolutely refuses to be entertaining or involving. So all we’re left with is its unremitting grimness, which, absent anything else to sustain our interest, merely leaves it a superficial drag. Well, I’m not gonna let the same thing happen to me. If I’m ever horrifically murdered by some unstable psycho*** and 50 Cent wants to produce a movie about it, tell him to go whole hog, EVIL DEAD over-the-top on it. If I’m going to be remembered for the tragic circumstances of my death, I’ll be damned if I’ll let them be a bunch of wet blankets about it. Give me some splatter! Some crazy fish eye lenses! A weird surreal trip into the killer’s subconscious. Maybe a psychic detective or two. Oooh, and John Cusack as the killer, no wait! Cusack as both the killer and the victim! And Nicholas Cage as his imaginary accomplice, who eggs him into it like that Dog played by John Turturro in SUMMER OF SAM! OR, even better, Cage as the voice of his beloved hamster “Rex,” who plays on his insecurities, emotionally manipulates him into killing (Tracy Morgan as the voice of the wacky comic relief hamster). Yeah, I like that. Hell, it would almost be worth getting offed by some greasy muttering psycho if I was sure my death would inspire that kind of greatness.

Just leave Hudgy Bear out of it, OK? Nobody deserves that.

I think we learned who the real monster is here. That's right: Peer Pressure.

*OK, OK, it’s actually “Jack Halcombe,” go ahead, spoil my fun. Halcombe is based on real-life detective Glenn Flothe, surely a nice man who solved the real-life case but unfortunately had a name which doesn’t sound like what Hollywood detectives are named, so fuck him.

** OK OK, not really, but how great would that have been? Had Stallone made this movie in the 80’s, he’d at least have tried, you know that in your heart. Actually the name is Robert Hansen, apparently no relation to the equally notorious FBI double agent Russian spy Robert Hanssen. But seriously parents, let’s not name kids that anymore, OK?

*** From wikipedia: ”In 1977, he was imprisoned for theft of a chainsaw, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to control his mood swings. He was never officially ordered to take the medication, however” [emphasis mine]. I’m no trained psychologist, but that sounds red flag-ish.