Don't waste your minutes

Watching Kim Basinger waste some guy's cellular minutes by calling him with a desperate plea for help might sound boring, but that's only because it is. "Cellular" confuses suspense with monotony by waiting until the very last minute to become an action-thriller.\nIn a melodramatic flurry of broken glass, suburban mom Jessica Martin (Basinger) is kidnapped from her home outside of Los Angeles. The assailants lock her in an attic. Her only company is a telephone that was smashed to pieces. Fortunately, Jessica is a crafty high school science teacher with the ability to use the phone's wires to tap out a signal that reaches a random number. Who gets the call? It's none other than an average, college-age, white male with a big heart named Ryan (Chris Evans). Ryan rushes around Los Angeles to save Jessica, keeping her on the line and avoiding the perils of low battery power. \nThe first hour of the film serves mostly as a public service announcement about the dangers of driving while talking on the phone. The mild suspense is punctuated by a few worthwhile comedic moments. A smattering of well-executed chase scenes and gunfights keep the audience from nodding off. The end is a landslide of action and drama that almost balances out the tedium of the beginning.\nThe one shining performance of the film comes from everybody's favorite sassy guy on the edge, William H. Macy. Macy plays the only character with personality, Sgt. Mooney, a mild-mannered cop with ambitions of starting his own day spa. He gracefully makes the transition from testing out facial masks to taking down bad guys; providing some of the film's more poignant laughs.\nThe DVD includes three featurettes. The first, "Celling Out," is a mildly interesting overview of the history of cellular technology. The second is a glimpse into the 1999 Los Angeles Rampart scandal; a real-life tale of cops gone bad which inspired the movie. The third featurette is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, offering a laughable prediction that Chris Evans will become the next Tom Cruise. There are also five deleted and alternate scenes, but watching them would only occupy precious moments of your life that you could never get back. The extra scenes simply add insight into how the film could be more vapid with less editing.\n"Cellular" proves that comedy and suspense rarely make a good cocktail. The film's comedic moments succeed, but the suspense is shallow and takes way too long to create a nail-biting effect.