The Cell
Director: Tarsem Singh
Starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio
and more
The first thing to be said about this film has to be its lack of script. There’s a story, dialogue and the like, but it’s not all that exciting or original. It’s pretty much run of the mill Hollywood techno-thriller stuff. But the operative word here is pretty, the film looks great.
It’s not just my Jennifer Lopez fetish (though for those of you who share it she wears a truly magnificent outfit for one scene) but the way the film is designed and shot, along with some cool effects, make a sizable chunk of it very interesting indeed.
The basic plot is this; Jennifer Lopez’ character (can’t even be bothered remembering character names) is a child psychologist working with this new technology which allows her to get inside the minds of other people, running around in their psyche and so forth, trying to help them out. It’s in this heavily symbolic mindscape that the film excels, but there has to be a reason for getting there.
That reason is a truly sick serial killer played by D’Onofrio, who is eventually caught by the FBI, led by pensive looking Vaughn. Trouble is he’s still got one victim awaiting a horrible death on an automatic timer, and he’s catatonic so no amount of interrogating would get it out of him. That’s where this flashy new technology comes in.
The delectable Lopez must delve into the mind of this rather twisted serial killer, gain the trust of the child side of him and somehow find out where the final victim is before it’s too late! I won’t blow the ending, but getting there has its moments, and most of them are in the minds of other people.
This is where the film takes off, and is also somewhat derivative. The thing for me is that it’s derived from things I actually enjoy. Except for The Matrix, which is acknowledged in a line about being in a dream he can’t wake up from. But like The Matrix it owes a large debt to the whole William Gibson and David Cronenberg view of mutable realities, in fact it reminded me a lot of Cronenberg’s brilliant eXistenZ, and those Star Trek TNG episodes on the holodeck. All right, you can call me a nerd now.
And as for the look of the mind, let’s just say that if Peter Greenaway and Terry Gilliam had a brainstorming session it might just look like this. Surreal to say the least, with distorted perspectives and locations, and what may or may not be symbols cropping up around the place. it’s not exactly a Freudian, or even Jungian, approach to the psyche, but it’s nice to watch. There’s even a solid dash of David Fincher style grainy darkness and flashy editing for one particularly gruesome scene involving a bathtub and knife and other stuff I’ll leave up to your imagination.
What may not be to everyone’s taste though is the strong undercurrent of sadism in this film. Twisted serial killers are meant to be horrible and cruel and one can imagine their minds aren’t exactly the cleanest and most hospitable places in the world, but I didn’t expect a minor blockbuster to be so straight-forward. There is a prolonged scene of child abuse which, while not explicit, is extremely unpleasant. The manner in which he tortures, kills and then deals with his victims is equally nasty, so those with a weak stomach should think hard about going to see this film.
That said it’s a reasonably enjoyable movie, very light on story, very predictable, but with enough nifty special effects and excursions into twisted inner realities to distract some of us. And of course there’s Jennifer Lopez for those of us who find her distracting. It’s probably the kind of movie people will happily forget within a few weeks, nothing about it struck me as supremely memorable, but on the other hand if you’re a sucker for the kind of directors I’ve mentioned there’s probably enough visual delights to keep you happy. But I’m not promising anything.
Craig Andrews
