At Boston Airport, it is a day like any other, chaotic and invaded by a crowd of departures and arrivals at the American airport. Among them is Clay Riddell, a comic book writer whose career is about to take a positive turn thanks to the sale of the rights to his graphic novel for a video game. While he is about to call his family, suddenly, people start going crazy and unleashing their most violent instincts due to a kind of virus coming from an electric impulse emitted by their cell phones. In little time, the waiting room of the airport becomes a theater of blood and death from which the protagonist manages to escape with difficulty, also thanks to the help of the worker Tom McCourt. With him, along with another group of survivors found on the street, he begins a long journey through desolate fields with the aim of defending themselves from this merciless epidemic and the hungry contaminated men. In all this, Clay is also looking for his wife and son, who remained trapped at home.
Horror cinema has always drawn heavily from literature, with a particular eye for Gothic classics and popular tales. Another great source of inspiration for many directors is represented by the vast production of novels by writer Stephen King, master of the shiver who has passionate and frightened his millions of fans around the world for years. A combination that has given rise to masterpieces like "The Shining" and other excellent films like "The Dead Zone", "It", "Carrie - The Look of Satan", "1408" and many more. However, not everything always goes as expected and sometimes the adaptation does not give the hoped-for results: this is the case of "Cell", a film based on the 2006 novel of the same name and, to be honest, not among the most successful of the Maine writer. Directed by Tod Williams (the one of "Paranormal Activity 2") and written by King himself in collaboration with Adam Alleca, already author of the screenplay for the remake of "The Last House on the Left", many excellent names that, however, give life to an anonymous film, without personality and never capable of captivating the viewer and creating the right empathy with the characters.
The great flaw of "Cell" is that it never takes a well-defined path and continuously changes narrative register, with the consequence of becoming a huge pot in which there is everything. The beginning is also one of the most encouraging, with the film that immediately gets to the heart of the matter with the vertiginous sequence in the airport where the people contaminated by the virus are protagonists of very splatter images and Clay is forced to maneuver through escalators and galleries to escape the murderous fury of the crowd. But it is only an illusion.
The story, in fact, soon takes a more conceptual turn, marked by slow rhythms, sometimes even soporific, which however only briefly focuses on the criticism of cell phones as a means of mass annihilation, to then concentrate decisively on one of the recurring themes of King's poetics, namely the insertion of autobiographical elements and the great space reserved for the dream dimension. And little help the marked Romerian atmospheres - the reference is clearly to "The City Will Be Destroyed at Dawn" - to raise the fortunes of a film in which even the characters, rendered in a flat and one-dimensional way, are not saved, with the only exception of the character of Tom, played by the good Samuel L. Jackson, who fully plays his purely macchiettistic role. As if that were not enough, the screenplay presents enormous holes that emerge in all their greatness and evidence in an ending at the limit of the incomprehensible, too rushed and not in line with the initial message that the story conceived by King wanted to convey.
The cast, in addition to the already mentioned Samuel L. Jackson, sees a John Cusack literally in trouble with a completely wrong character and an Alice Maxwell who does what she can in the role of a girl reduced to the condition of a puppet.
"Cell", in conclusion, represents the most classic of wasted opportunities, given the good potential coming from the basic subject that perhaps would have been more suitable for a miniseries than for a film of little more than an hour and a half.
Curiosity: Among the executive producers is the name of the good French director Xavier Gens... if he had been in charge of the direction, maybe now we would be talking about another film.
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