Buy it... if you find enjoyment in John Ottman's ability to turn predictable thriller scores into overachieving exercises in creative rhythm and instrumentation.

Avoid it... if no measure of creativity in the soundscape can compensate for an otherwise mundane collection of redundant techniques often heard in Ottman's music for B-rate films of this era.

Ottman

Cellular: (John Ottman) If you're the type of person who loathes cell phones, then perhaps this film's not for you. The screenwriter of Phone Booth, Larry Cohen, must have decided that he had conquered the market on phone booth terror, so he turned to every possible method of thrilling a person with the familiar concept of a failing cell phone in the plot of 2004's Cellular. In essence, a tenuous and random cell phone connection between a woman being held hostage in her own home and an average Joe on the streets sends the young man on a race against time and his cell phone battery to help this woman and her family. Despite the numerous plot holes that always arise when you stretch a topic like this one to such great limits, the film does survive on its performances and twists in direction. Though suffering only mild slaps of punishment from critics, the film still didn't hold well enough with audiences to keep it in the theatres very long, setting it up nicely for endless cable re-runs. Director David R. Ellis had been a fan of composer John Ottman's work for The Usual Suspects and X-Men 2 and thus successfully pursued Ottman for the scoring duties on Cellular. The plot of intrigue and terror seemed right up the alley at the time for the composer, who seemed ever-willing to traverse the range of blockbusters to duds and toy with any cheap thriller he had time to get his hands on. Once again, it was a project for which he could often switch between structures in the major and minor keys for obvious portrayals of good and evil. Even more than in his initial years as a composer, though, Ottman had become obsessed in the early 2000's with the idea of recording sound effects associated with the films he composed for and incorporating some variation of their sound into a rhythm or distinct instrumental twist that elevates his music beyond the usual trash that exists for B-rated suspense and drama flicks. With Cellular, he continued this trend, almost to levels of unnecessary intelligence for this kind of film, and, in the event you can't appreciate such music for its thematic and rhythmic integrity, this technique serves as an interesting study in smaller-budget ingenuity in instrumentation. Whether Cellular tickles your fancy or not will depend on your interest in these unusual tactics, because the score's remaining aspects are otherwise generic.

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Thankfully for Cellular, Ottman did seem to take shameless pride in his attention to unique sounds. If a purely average, if not substandard score for a television movie such as Point of Origin could be shaped into a delightfully wicked listening experience on album simply because of the incorporation of typewriter sounds, then why can't Cellular be equally as enticing with its distorted cell phone tones and police sirens? The score opens over the studio logo with the phone tones, manipulated and overlayed with woodwinds so that they're not as obvious as they probably needed to be (they could easily be missed by a casual listener accustomed to large sample libraries). The police sirens do catch your attention to a greater extent when their brass renditions are present (as in "Epiphany/Bank"), though they too seemed underplayed. At some point, with a score like Cellular that is merely average in every other regard, you almost wish that Ottman, who is difficult to even outsmart in these regards, would hit listeners with even more blatant elements of musical intrigue. As for the straight suspense and thriller angles in Cellular, Ottman applies one somewhat elusive, mundane theme for both the hero and the hostage, appropriate mutations for their separate performances revealed for the two very different characters. The hero's thematic representations push the coolness factor, from the hip stealing of a Porsche to the "Going Shopping" and "Making a Connection" cues, both of which enjoying some pizzazz from electric guitars and rocking loops. The hostage's version of the theme exists in "Abduction" and "The Bait," the latter featuring slurred brass a la Jerry Goldsmith's The Shadow.These passages exude the sentimentality you hear from Ottman's style of writing targeted at a morbidly sad electronic choir (and brief portions here remind of the main thematic performance in Gothika). Neither version of the theme is really preferable on album, and Ottman is careful to make sure that these differing styles never overlap to any degree. The fuller performances of the idea are typically restrained to woodwinds, strings, and piano in subtle fashion, allowing a powerful and commanding brass motif (highlighted by a resounding grouping of French horns) to steal the personality of Cellular by the end. Overall, Ottman's creative nature continues to float what would otherwise be a rather uninteresting project, but all but the most avid collectors of the composer's music will likely find the effort to be boringly redundant. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For John Ottman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22 (in 32 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.03 (in 17,523 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.