Over The Thrill? (2004)

CELLULAR Kim Basinger, Chris Evans PG-13, 89 mins. (New Line)

PAPARAZZI Cole Hauser, Tom Sizemore PG-13, 92 mins. (20th Century Fox)

WICKER PARK Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne PG-13, 114 mins. (MGM)

If you go to enough thrillers, activities that should look extreme begin, instead, to appear entertainingly ordinary. In Cellular, there is kidnapping, armed robbery, homicide, and a car chase down the wrong side of the freeway, not to mention some criminally low-rent dialogue, all compacted with machine efficiency. Paparazzi and Wicker Park, on the other hand, are devoted to the issue of stalking, which they both edge into the category of mainstream—in one case even sympathetic—behavior. In different ways, these films represent the domestication of deviance.

In the opening moments of Cellular, Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger), a high school science teacher, is kidnapped out of her nice Brentwood home and taken to a grungy attic, where she attempts to save herself by rubbing together the wires of a smashed telephone. It works: She randomly dials the cell phone of a beach bum named Ryan (Chris Evans), imploring him to stay on the line and go to the police. Before long, he is whipping around Los Angeles in a variety of stolen vehicles, hanging on the line in the same frantic way that Colin Farrell did in Phone Booth—only this time, he's the savior rather than victim, and he couldn't be less stationary. Based on a story by Larry Cohen (who also wrote Phone Booth), Cellular plays its telecommunication premise less for novelty than for pure chase-thriller excitement. It's like the madly busy climax of an action film stretched out to feature length. It's fun to see Ryan burst into a cellular store and brandish a handgun to get to the front of the line before his battery runs out, and the film keeps zigzagging in new directions, even if its individual parts feel far from new. It's fortunate that the actors know exactly what they're doing. Chris Evans is blithely likable despite a few faux-Cruise mannerisms, Basinger makes a vividly frightened yet resourceful woman in peril, and William H. Macy scores as a mild L.A. cop who lets out his inner macho.

As Rex Harper, the bottom-feeding celebrity shutterbug of Paparazzi, Tom Sizemore, an actor with sleaze in his marrow, does a variation on his specialty: the lowlife operator who grins just at the moment he's sliming you, as if he were asking you to share in the delight of his corruption. Harper sets about snapping invasive family photographs of a newly minted schlock action star named Bo Laramie, played by Cole Hauser with an overcooked glare of bug-eyed outrage that renders him even steelier than Peter Weller. In its early scenes, Paparazzi exploits, with a certain brute B-movie effectiveness, an ugly reality—that even the worst excesses of tabloid photographers are part of a tacit contract with the public. The long-lensed rats do the digging, and we glory in the dirt. That's a tasty subject for a movie, but once Rex and his fellow stalkerazzi cause Bo and his family to get into a car accident that echoes the one that killed Princess Diana, it doesn't take long for the film to devolve into a ludicrously far-fetched Celebrity Death Wish.

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park, unjustly lambasted by most critics, makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways. The hero, a junior ad executive played with a gentle wince of passion by Josh Hartnett, is presented, explicitly, as the most romantic of stalkers. We see him in scenes that take place two years apart: first, when he's working at a camera store and spies a beautiful stranger (Diane Kruger), whom he follows to a dance class, ultimately trespassing right into her heart; and, later, after they have broken up, when he becomes involved with the enigmatic Alex (Rose Byrne), who turns stalking into a form of identity theft. The director, Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1), layers time so that the past and the present melt, at least in spirit, into one. You have to work, maybe a bit too hard, to follow Wicker Park; I could hear the audience turn off to it the more complicated it got. Yet the final clinch, scored to Coldplay's ''The Scientist,'' is a moving testament to the way that ''normal'' amorous behavior needs, at times, to lurch into obsession. The movie doesn't make the extreme look ordinary so much as it finds one inside the other. Cellular: B -- Paparazzi: C Wicker Park: B+

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