Was David R. Ellis a hack filmmaker?
This really stuck out while reading reviews for Cellular:
https://www.salon.com/2004/09/10/cellular_2/
But entertaining as "Cellular" is, Ellis doesn't have complete control over its tone. The picture is snickeringly funny in places (particularly a sequence involving a snotball lawyer and his freebie sports car with its "WL SU YOU 2" license plate). But Ellis can't always distinguish between suspense and sadism, and unfortunately, Basinger is the performer who suffers for that. Basinger is a limited actress, but there's a fragile sweetness about her that tends to inspire protectiveness in an audience, if not excitement. Ellis seems to take far too much pleasure in showing her being knocked around and terrorized: When Statham, as Ethan, swings at her with that mallet, or seizes her and lashes her slender neck to a post with his leather belt, her eyes betray genuine terror.
This bothered me as I watched "Cellular," and after reading the press notes for the movie, I understood why. Ellis claims that he didn't rehearse some of the "more physical scenes" between Statham and Basinger; instead, he gave Statham an idea of the effect he was after and allowed Basinger to be surprised.
Surprised by having a belt whipped around your neck? "Surprising" an actor like that isn't directing -- it's cheating. Actors are paid to act. Tricking a good performance out of them isn't evidence of a director's skill -- only of his cluelessness. (The "directors" of "The Blair Witch Project" used similar tricks on their actors -- and where are they now?)
Ellis has some talent, or at least a sense of how to keep a thriller moving, and later in "Cellular," Basinger gets a chance to be more than just a terrified beauty. (Be on the lookout for her dazzling 10th-grade biology trick.) But her debasement in the early part of the film is unpleasant to watch, and it's an unsettling bump in the context of the entertaining sheen of the rest of the picture. So much of "Cellular" is right on the button. If only it hadn't gotten its wires crossed.
https://www.showbizmonkeys.com/movies.php?id=232
I was literally baffled to see how many different ways that stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis was able to screw up the intense thriller-based scenes. Everywhere the audience turns there is another thing to disrupt the tension. The cellphone battery running out, going into a tunnel will lose the signal, and crossing connections to another cellphone user are all plot elements that if executed well could have been hair-raising but instead come off as more "obstacle-course" comedy/action sequences than tense moments.
Ellis was able to use his style of action and humor in his previous film Final Destination 2, which worked somewhat, but here it just seems in bad taste. Do we really want to laugh as a guy tries to save a woman from an insane kidnapper?
And it doesn't just begin or stop with this film:
http://regrettablesincerity.com/?p=4297
In The Final Destination, director David R. Ellis does such a poor job of establishing any characters or plot that the death scenes (predicated on screws coming loose or on devices that topple over into something else, causing a chain reaction *) create no sense of death as a character at all. The entire raison-d’etre for these films becomes a chronology of the complex and convoluted ways that the characters die as a result of their initial escape from certain doom. The deaths in The Final Destination play as if the wind were acting up, causing scaffolding to fall on a group of people. Or an entire race track exploded because of a shoddy bench-building job by a construction company that didn’t stabilize a concrete structure.
https://www.flickfeast.co.uk/amp/reviews/film-reviews/shark-night-3d-2011/
No. No, no, no. The actual explanation to how the sharks come to be in the lake and just what the hell is going on is, admittedly, a little bit amusing but also absolutely awful. It’s a joke taken too far and mishandled by the direction from David R. Ellis (who can often be a solid director when it comes to entertaining trash but can also just as easily provide unentertaining trash) and the poor script by Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg.
https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/movie-reviews/2011/09/03/Shark-Night-leaves-bad-aftertaste/stories/201109030218
Director David R. Ellis has delivered a heartless, suspense-free 90 minutes of sharks dining out on kids stuck on an island in a Louisiana lake. It's one of those magical movie locations: There's no cell reception, and while the power grid serves the island-mansion where the Tulane seven hang out, nobody thought to install a land line. With conditions like these, it's no wonder Louisiana has to give away the store in incentives to get Hollywood to film there. share