THE CELL
Review by John Beachem
* 1/2
Directed by: Tarsem Singh Written by: Mark Protosevich
Serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) is murdering young women by placing them in a sealed glass room for forty hours and then flooding the room till they drown. FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) has finally tracked the killer down, but Stargher has fallen into a coma from which he will never awaken. This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that he kidnapped one last girl who is in that very room, and she's running out of time. Novak has no idea where the room is, so he employs the services of Dr. Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a child psychologist, who can use a technology to enter peoples' minds. It seems Catherine is able to make her patients trust her better than any psychologist who has tried the machine before. Novak hopes Stargher will trust her and tell her the location. She agrees to enter Stargher's mind, but she's never experienced anything like Stargher's mind before. Soon she's lost in the disturbing world of Stargher's sub-conscious, unable to tell she's no longer in the real world. So Novak decides to go in and fetch her, but Stargher's mind is ready for him.
Stephen King once said, regarding Stanley Kubrick's adaption of "The Shining", "I think you want to hurt people with this movie." I disagree with his assessment of Kubrick's horror masterpiece (In my humble opinion anyway), but I think his words can be accurately applied to Tarsem Singh's travesty, "The Cell". There's nothing remotely likeable about this film. The only thing I could think of that I somewhat enjoyed were a few special effects sequences. Other than that, I was experiencing only three different emotions: bored, confused, and outraged. It's also the only movie this year that I've almost walked out of. Is it worse than "Battlefield Earth"? Of course not, but at least that piece of tripe was so bad I could laugh at it. "The Cell" is one of the most pretentious, stuck up movies I've ever seen (it even beat out "Magnolia"), completely convinced of how important its message is. It's one thing for a movie to feature a controversial message, it's quite another for the writers to cram that message down your throat. Singh and Protosevich do just that in "The Cell", and I hope never to see another film from either of them.
So how does the acting fare in this horrendous movie? Well, you've got Vincent D'Onofrio ("13th Floor") playing a serial killer; something he seems to enjoy very much, but he sleepwalks his way through the role. I heard him in a recent interview discussing the types of roles he now takes, and he stated "I take only the roles which interest me." If that's the case, and this role interested him, I think Mr. D'Onofrio might be in need of serious medical attention. Jennifer Lopez (who was wonderful in last year's "Out of Sight") seems to be convinced, throughout the film, that speaking softly all the time is the same thing as acting concerned. The only problem is I couldn't hear half the "concerned" things she was saying. Vince Vaughn ("Swingers", the horrible "Psycho" remake) isn't given much of a chance to act since his character is so underdeveloped. Protosevich's idea of developing the character seems to be for him to say that he doesn't agree with killers blaming their crimes on their childhood. When Lopez's character argues with him about this however, he doesn't really fight back. Watch for a cameo by James Gammon ("Major League") as a local police officer.
In that first paragraph I mentioned a message being crammed down our throats, and that message is basically all there is to "The Cell". Singh tries to hide it behind bizarre visuals and overly dramatic dialogue, but all I noticed was the message being shoved in my face. What was this message that I refer to with such bitterness? Simply, that inside every psychopathic serial killer there's a scared little person trying to get out. What a serial killer does is really just a cry for help so people will listen to him, since his parents were abusive when he was a child. I figure there will be three different groups of people seeing this movie: first will be the group to which I belong - outraged that this message was being thrown at us; second is the group that agrees with the message and thinks it's wonderful that it's being shown in a movie; and last is the luckiest group, those who either don't notice or don't care about the message and just sit there dazzled by the pretty colors on screen. If you're in the first group, I urge you to stay away from this movie. If you're in the second group, I adamantly disagree with you. If you're in the third group, I envy you.
Obviously, one of the biggest draws of "The Cell" is the shocking visuals, and I'll admit, they look nice in about a scene and a half. Other than that, they generally resemble poor attempts to imitate Clive Barker. It's as though the film makers were thinking "let's see what bizarre/disgusting image we can hurl at them next", without using images that went along with the story. Tarsem Singh's filming style involves giving all the dream sequences a washed out look for no other reason than to distinguish between dreams and real life (as though the floating people and pools of blood weren't tipping us off). It also involves making everything from the dialogue (except Jennifer Lopez's) to the music (an obnoxious score by Howard Shore) to the sound effects gratingly loud and in-your-face. Tarsem Singh is a first time director, and I can only hope he'll never be handed another project. "The Cell" runs a long 105 minutes. I'd recommend it only to psychology majors who want to either argue or agree with the film's message and to aspiring directors so they can see how not to present strange visuals. I give the movie one and a half out of five stars.
Comments? Send to: johnbeachem@dependentfilms.net
Past reviews can be found at: http://www.epinions.com/user-elerad?public=yes or http://us.imdb.com/ReviewsBy?John+Beachem
* * * * * - One of the best movies of the year. * * * * - Great flick, try and catch this one. * * * - Okay movie, hits and misses. * * - Pretty bad, see it at your own risk. * - See this one only if you enjoy pain.
Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews