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NO MATTER HOW many times you've been disappointed at movies, you go into each new film hoping it will seize its premise and create an experience that's exciting, artful and connected to life. When it doesn't happen, you take refuge in Sturgeon's Law, which holds that 90 percent of everything is crap. But this knowledge is rarely a comfort because you've given two hours of your life to a film that ignored its own potential for excellence.

The phenomenon is often more apparent while watching thrillers. The genre exists to turn nightmares and daydreams into entertainment, and hook viewers with images of ordinary lives turning extraordinary. This primal appeal means viewers might give themselves over to a mediocre, formulaic thriller with an abandon they might not summon for films that defy easy categorization-films like Northfork, Osama, Cowards Bend the Knee, Gozu, When Will I Be Loved and A Letter to True. The allure of suspense is so strong that one tends to give oneself over to a thriller even if it's merely adequate. One bought a ticket to have one's buttons pushed, and even when the director's touch is cloddish, one is inclined to ignore the bruising and pretend it's a graceful touch.

Exhibits A and B: Cellular and Paparazzi, new thrillers with catchy premises that plug into the zeitgeist. The former is about a young man who gets a random cell phone call from a kidnap victim and embarks on a mad odyssey to save her; the latter is a revenge fantasy about a young movie star battling scuzzy photographers who've invaded his privacy and harmed his family. Scratch the surface of both films and you find premises of undeniable relevance. Cellular is built around a central irony of 21st century life: The same communications devices that were supposed to unite us as a society have actually driven us apart, allowing us to retreat into our own little selfish, clueless bubbles. Without meaning to, Paparazzi taps into one of the reasons for retreating into a bubble: the widespread sense that there's too much personal information floating around within easy grasp of human predators, and the only sensible response is to retreat into a cocoon and lash out against would-be invaders. But in the end, neither movie can overcome lazy plotting, weak performances and a prosaic single-mindedness that's the antithesis of good pop art. They're the kinds of films audiences cheer and jeer in equal measure.

Cellular is more lighthearted-a haphazard suspense picture from former stuntman turned filmmaker David R. Ellis, in which gorgeous science teacher Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) gets kidnapped from her Brentwood mini-mansion by armed thugs and locked in the attic of an unfamiliar house. Moments after Jessica's imprisonment, the leader of the goons (rising action star Jason Statham) barges into the attic armed with a baseball bat and smashes a wall phone behind her head (a potentially scary gag spoiled by obvious camera placement and too-emphatic lighting that calls attention to the phone). Jessica waits till the goon leaves, then uses her science knowledge to futz with the pieces of the phone until she dials out and randomly contacts a cell phone belonging to a dopey young beach bum named Ryan (Chris Evans). Ryan dismisses Jessica as a prankster at first, then accepts her panic as genuine and drives the phone to a local police station and hands it to Mooney (William H. Macy), a veteran cop on the verge of retirement. (Is there any other kind?) When a riot breaks out at the police station, Mooney tells Ryan to take the phone upstairs to another department (standard advice, one presumes, to Los Angelenos who visit local precinct houses during riots). But Ryan's phone signal gets weaker as he climbs the stairs, and he's so worried about losing contact that he heads back down and spends the rest of the movie driving around Los Angeles, trying to find and rescue a woman he's never met.

While the Cellular script is credited to newcomer Chris Morgan, the story was devised by exploitation ace Larry Cohen, who wrote a thematically related 2002 movie, Phone Booth. In the abstract, Cellular seems an improvement. The earlier Cohen story, about a sniper menacing a publicist trapped in a phone booth, was a promising botch, nostalgically attached to its glassed-in title locale and weakened by provincial showbiz resentments. It wanted to make statements about how modern technology breeds alienation. But much of the time, the film just seemed a weird revenge fantasy by a filmmaker obsessed by the dubious proposition that hype is the root of all modern evil and its practitioners vermin who should repent or die. Cellular's characters are decent people trapped in a web they didn't spin-and the movie has a wiser structure, too. Rather than confine its hero to one location, it forces him to wander everywhere while getting nowhere-a neat analog for the difference beween old phone technology and the newer kind. Throughout much of Cellular, Jessica is stuck in an attic and Ryan is driving all over town-trying, variously, to find Jessica, stop the thugs from kidnapping Jessica's son and recharge his ebbing cell phone battery.

I've chided other critics for fixating too much on plausibility-a quality one only deigns to notice when one doesn't like a movie-but Cellular is so dumb that it awakened my inner scold.

The script's brazen contrivances obscure what could have been a great, or at least relevant and interesting, film. There are bursts of violence, but for the most part, Cellular aims for a breezy tone that tiptoes over satire. At various points, Ryan is distracted by booming hiphop on a car stereo and by an arrogant yuppie whose own cell phone signal mixes with Ryan's, and even pauses to chastise a fellow driver for talking on a phone while driving (it's unsafe, you know). During a rendezvous at the pier between Ryan and the bad guys, a cop tells his men they can spot Ryan because "he's the one on the cell phone," at which point the movie cuts to an overhead shot revealing a sea of people yammering into cell phones. Everywhere Ryan goes, he's confronted with people whose brains seem to have been replaced by Nokia phones. To save a stranger, Ryan has to get beyond himself. It's not easy because until today, he didn't even know he was inside a bubble-a notion illustrated midway through Cellular by the film's most potent image, a closeup of a goldfish swimming in a glass of water.

Paparazzi is a much meaner film, a vigilante thriller animated by rage so sharp and personal, and filled with revenge imagery so loaded and ugly-that it might be a piece of propaganda commissioned to persuade wannabe-actors to take up a differnet line of work. Cole Hauser plays rising action star Bo Laramie, who relocates to Wyoming following his first big success, only to be swarmed with evil photographers. These sweaty, unshaven louts seem motivated by a pathological hatred of Bo's accomplishments, which include multi-million-dollar paychecks and a starring role in Adrenaline Force. They invade Bo's property, provoke him into fisticuffs and snap vague yet suggestive photos of Bo, his wife and his son, which are then republished in supermarket tabloids alongside stories full of made-up garbage. The paparazzi are so foul you can smell them. Their ranks include Daniel Baldwin as a photog whose boastful talk of "shooting" celebrities has a post-John Lennon edge of Nowhere Man malice, and Tom Sizemore as notorious shutterbug and known rapist Rex Harper, who pores over contact sheets alone in his lair while chortling, "Laramie, I'm gonna destroy your life and eat your soul!" They're so horrible that Bo can spend the rest of the picture killing them with a clear conscience. o