Normally, September and October are a dumping ground for the movies not good enough to make it into the summer schedule and not big enough for the Christmas release. Cellular defies that conventional wisdom by being a well-written, good suspenseful movie.

Wasting very little time on set-up, Cellular dives straight into the action. Dotting mother and high school biology teacher Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) is kidnapped in what she thinks must be a case of mistaken identity. After the phone is destroyed by the kidnapper (the lead kidnapper being British actor Jason Statham), Basinger is able to reassemble the barely functional phone enough to make one call. With her one phone call, she reaches Ryan (Chris Evans), a party boy who's been recently dumped by his girlfriend, Chloe (Jessica Biel) for being immature and irresponsible. Convinced that it's not a prank call, Ryan does his best to get help for Mrs. Martin including enlisting the help of veteran police Detective Mooney (William H. Macy).

Writer Chris Morgan does an excellent job of raising the stakes throughout Cellular. With a tight and fast-moving script, he doesn't waste time with distracting subplots or extraneous back story. The audience is with him all the way, laughing and cheering at all the right parts.

Of course, this is Hollywood so I'm not going to quibble about the fact that zipping around LA like Ryan does is next to impossible. The movie also comes with a few convenient meetings and coincidences but if all movies were 'realistic' they'd be boring. Who would pay to see someone sitting in traffic on the 405?