In 1998, a scandal broke involving the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier in the 1990s, some three dozen members of an anti-gang police task force in the Rampart Division, a unit located halfway between downtown and Hollywood, were revealed to have interrogated and brutalized residents without probable cause and then fabricated evidence to wrongfully convict more than one hundred Hispanics. Among the misdeeds, one officer robbed a bank, another wrongfully shot and killed a resident, and at least two were involved in selling cocaine that had been confiscated during police raids. In Cellular, director David R. Ellis imaginatively suggests how such a scandal might have been exposed due to a telephone call from high school science teacher Jessica Martin (played by Kim Basinger) to a cellphone of a twenty-year-old beachgoer named Ryan (played by Chris Evans). When the film begins, Jessica is sending her eleven-year-old son off to school from her Brentwood home, and Ryan is trying to rekindle a romance with a girlfriend at the Santa Monica Pier. Soon, plainclothes police break into the Martin's house, shoot the housekeeper, kidnap Jessica, take her to an abandoned house in an isolated part of Baldwin Hills, and lock her up in the attic. What they seek, as revealed later, is a videotape filmed by her husband, in which police are filmed stealing drug money and beating gang members in a manner similar to the methods used by the anti-gang task force cabal. When Jessica claims that she knows nothing of the videotape, the police kidnap her son, and she discloses her husband's whereabouts in response to a threat on the boy's life. By jiggling wires together from a telephone, which her interrogator has smashed in the attic where she is locked up, she dials a number at random and reaches the self-centered Ryan, who only acts on her story when she keeps pleading with him urgently to take ten minutes of his time to go to the police. Thereafter, Jessica maintains almost constant contact with Ryan, who first complies with her suggestion to go to a police station. When he does so, the duty officer, twenty-seven-year police veteran Mooney (played by William H. Macy), is distracted and goes off duty before he is able to act on the matter; but at home, when he sees Ryan on late-breaking TV news involved in a strange crime spree across town, he is galvanized into action. Meanwhile, Jessica directs Ryan to save her son from being kidnapped at the end of the school day and, later, to save her husband at LAX from the pursuit. Ryan complies after hearing her captor threaten Jessica, but he arrives too late in each case to save them. Nevertheless, he manages to retrieve the videotape, which he copies onto his cameraphone. In Ryan's pursuit across town, he is impeded by a sample of the many assholes who litter the LA landscape, including a school security guard, a smart-ass lawyer, a convertible with a boombox at full blast, and bureaucratic sales clerks. Neither Jessica nor Ryan at first realizes that her kidnappers are police officers. Eventually, there is a showdown, with Ryan and Mooney play the role of heroes who vanquish the bad cops. To discover how the film has something to do with LAPD's corrupt cops and the Rampart scandal, filmviewers must see the DVD, released in 2005, which contains Code of Silence: Inside the Rampart Scandal, a documentary directed by Chris Sikorowski. MH
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