Considering I went into Cell with abysmally low expectations, it turned out to be not too bad. Not that this necessarily means that it's all good, but there are some good things I can say about this. I'm pretty sure, from what I've heard about the book (at best it's liked but not loved, sort of a middle-tier King work, not one of his triumphs but not a failure either, something fun he could knock off in a month or two as one of those 'hey this is happening in the real world, I'll use it for one of my spooktacular stories' things) that this actually makes for an accurate assessment. It's a standard-issue zombie-ish story of people being infected and going bugf*** insane, only this time King (who also gets a screen writing credit) adds a kind of bird-pulse-hive-mind thing that only gets explained enough to move the plot along.

Maybe in the book it was explained more or better; here, it seems like some weird and borderline lame (or just lame) device to keep us sort of on our toes, like, 'oh, hey, this time they're *not* vomiting blood on one another or eating brains, and any gunshot can kill them, not just the head, gotcha, thanks.' But more lame than that is the generic story thing of 'well, my son and ex are somewhere, and I'm gonna go find them' when, naturally, it's not going to be pretty or something he likes when he finds out (that he being Cusack, who is doing the best he can with fairly weak-tea material). Meanwhile, Samuel L Jackson does his best Ken Foree (intentional or not) from Dawn of the Dead, and is a reason to see the movie - even in the midst of some mediocre writing or plotting, or moments that can make one groan, he's there to work and it's not something to be embarrassed about on his resume.

As for the action, it's... fair. I guess I may be tired of seeing action shot with the shutter off (that's when the camera has this function that makes it go, oh, nevermind, you know it when you see it),and I think Tod Williams is a competent director of action but not one who can make things as thrilling as it should be. By the time you see one character go to a door slowly - not in this, I mean in any other movie you've ever seen in your lives - you've seen them all, and this has a lot of that. And while at one time I felt apprehensive about Eli Roth being the director, as he was attached for a period of time after the book first came out (his movies tend to be Dumb with a capital, sometimes double, D),now I'd be curious as to what he might have changed or made more visceral or f***ed up.

Cell goes through the motions, has some decent atmosphere, and a couple of those strange touches that I'm sure come from that primordial cavern that is King's sub(or regular)consciousness - such as the whole aspect of how these beings screech and them come together (which is a fascinating sight to me),or Stacy Keach having the whole football stadium of infected asleep listening to the... is that the yodeling from that Christopher Lee mashup from LOTR online(?) But there's not enough of it to make it stand out; while I haven't seen enough of it to make a full comparison, my gut tells me this is, to the lay-person, Walking Dead lite, with some good actors doing their best and only rising to meet the absolute minimum required.

... okay, maybe the ending is a little terrible, but my rating still stands.

CELL is the big-screen adaptation of one my least favourite Stephen King novels. I do like the subject of zombies but in the hands of King they ended up being ridiculous. This film version gets rid of some of the dumber elements from the novel - the levitation scenes, for example - but is still in no way good. Things are at their best in the early outbreak scene, which suffers from shaky camera syndrome a bit but is generally exciting if you can ignore the odd dodgy CGI shot of an exploding plane and the like. John Cusack, looking tired and bloated, is a poor choice of lead, while Samuel L. Jackson is purely on autopilot here and has none of the fire-and-brimstone charisma you see from him elsewhere. The film gets worse as it goes along, lacking suspense and saddled with unlikeable characters and cliched situations, until it ends on a scene which made me laugh out loud at the inept cheapness of it all.

Cell is a post apocalyptic road film. A powerful phone signal turns many people to almost mindless violent zombies. In effect the mobile phone signal has reprogrammed them.

John Cusack plays a graphic artist artist trying to make it back to his home to be with his family. He teams up with other survivors including Samuel L Jackson. In the daytime they have to avoid or confront these mindless people, at night they tend to be safer as the mindless hordes are resting. Soon the survivors have similar visions, especially of a man in a red hoodie who might be controlling everyone including the survivors.

Cell is based on a book by Stephen King. The film looks low budget and cheap despite the cast. It is not much of a horror film after the initial violence scenes. We get little by way of an explanation as to why this has happened or what caused it?

The film is silly but entertaining enough even though the film had post production issues. The end title credits suggest that the events could all be in Cusack's head.