Jennifer Lopez’s new film, The Cell, topped the box office in its opening weekend, pulling in over seventeen million dollars in ticket sales. Critics as well as audiences supported the film, giving it incredibly positive reviews. In fact, Roger Ebert called it “one of the best films of the year.”
But these things do not make the movie any more than what it is, a pretentious and disjointed patchwork of visuals with the barest shoestring of a nonsensical plot. This movie fools you into thinking it could actually be good by presenting some fantastic and frightening images in its trailers. Yet pointless dialogue, sloppy storytelling, and less than adequate acting drag this movie down from its lofty potential into mediocrity.
In The Cell, Jennifer Lopez plays Catherine, a social worker who utilizes experimental technology to go into the minds of comatose children. How was this technology developed and how does it work? Why does she even enter their minds when she admits that the problem behind this coma is not at all psychological, instead is a tumor that cannot be cured? All good questions, but they are glossed over quickly in order to delve into other aspects of the plot instead.
At the same time in another part of the world, a serial killer played by Vincent D’Onofrio has been abducting young women and placing them in a cell that slowly fills with water and drowns them. Later D’Onofrio bleaches the skin of the dead girl and sexually violates her while watching a video of her death. While this description might seem disturbing, the actual events on film are far from it. The director of the film shows us each step of the process, rather than leaving some of it to our imagination as a riveting thriller like Seven or Silence of the Lambs might, and it becomes easier for the audience members to desensitize themselves to the violent acts depicted on the screen.
Shortly after the killer abducts another victim, he collapses into a coma, coincidentally almost at the exact same time that the team of FBI agents trying to catch him, led by Vince Vaughn, burst into his house to capture him. Did brilliant detective work help the good guys catch the killer? Not really; for the most part the FBI agents are painted as bumbling incompetents who would rather sleep on the job and primp themselves so they look nice in their black suits than do actual detecting. In comparison, Vaughn seems to be the hero, but his wooden and uninspired performance ends up proving him otherwise. He is supposed to be intelligent and driven; instead he just looks sleepy and has a mastery of stating the obvious.
Had the killer not “gotten sloppy” as serial killers in movies often do, Vaughn would never have had the forensic evidence necessary to put two and two together and find out who was committing the murders. But when that forensic evidence presents itself (as it must--otherwise the film would not progress), the clues are so evident that the Hardy Boys would have had no trouble solving the case. The chase itself to find the killer is incredibly uninteresting, and when this portion of the film begins, it seems out of joint with the earlier plotline involving Jennifer Lopez’s character and her experiments.
Yet soon these two seemingly unrelated storylines weave together, again as was inevitable, when Catherine is called upon to go into the killer’s mind and find out where he has hidden his last victim before she too is drowned. When Catherine enters D’Onofrio's psyche, the imagery in the films transforms into a twisted and perverse landscape which, while it looks intriguing, is really rather arbitrary. None of the symbols or images seem to mean anything; they are simply there to freak the audience out, which--save for a horse which gets vivisected for no known reason--they fail to do, often being more amusing than haunting. It is also ironic that the strange things within the mind of a psychotic would be so straightforward. You would think things would be a lot more random and jumbled within the mind of a schizophrenic but apparently not.
In the end, the time restraint Lopez is under to find the whereabouts of the missing girl is not pressing enough for the audience to care, for it has taken too long to get to that point in the story. Occasional shots of the girl within a half-filled tank of water were intended to heighten the tension, but fell far short. It is obvious throughout the entire movie that this girl will be rescued; the audience merely sits back and waits for it to happen, knowing that she is in no real danger. Again, a truly engaging thriller would have made us care so much about the character and her imminent demise that we would have been on the edge of our seats, but The Cell is a far cry from engaging.
Early in the film Vince Vaughn asks one of the scientists, in a poorly written exchange of exposition, why there are enough stations in the lab for two people to enter one mind at once. Clearly the answer is “’Cause you’ll have to go into the killer’s head too at some point.” Sure enough he does, and the moment he enters this world, things really take a downward turn. More odd yet arbitrary images fill the screen, along with the kind of technicolor light tricks better suited for “Laser Pink Floyd” than for a major motion picture. Vaughn “rescues” Lopez from getting drawn too deep into the killers world with the old “remember your past” trick, then makes a discovery while within the brain of the killer that helps him find the missing girl. This “discovery” is again something the most amateur of detectives could have figured out on their own, without the benefit of the mind-swapping technology. I guess it wouldn’t have been much a movie if he had figured it out on his own, but then again this isn’t much of a movie anyway.
The obligatory final conflict between Lopez and D’Onofrio too is completely meaningless, considering the fact that the killer is in a coma and can not ever come out of it. Again this “resolution” is totally unnecessary, yet simply because the killer MUST be taken down in a Hollywood movie, tradition dictates (much more so than the actual script does) they must come together and fight to the death in the end. I’m sure you can guess who wins.
That this final conflict occurs in Lopez’s mind, again utilizing supposed foreshadowing that has all the subtlety of a Towers South fire alarm in the dead of winter, does nothing to endear itself to the audience. (Honestly, why have a door that locks from the inside in your experimental lab? So that you can lock out the other scientists who might prevent you from trying the never-before-attempted procedure that everyone told you earlier in the film that you were crazy for considering, of course!) The strange images for some reason also fill her mind, which makes even less sense when she is supposed to be the SANE one. I don’t know about anyone else, but MY dreams tend to take place in locales I’m familiar with, like my house or Grauel building, not inside of snow globes, and definitely not with me wearing clothing like that of a nun I saw in a picture two seconds before falling asleep--and why was a picture of a nun in a laboratory in the first place?
The Cell could have been a good movie, had the acting been more powerful, had the characters been interesting, had the dialogue been relevant. Instead the script stuck to cliches and the director went with flash over style, leaving this movie to languish in its inadequacies. For a movie that is being hailed as innovative, it surprises me how much of this movie covers familiar ground. The Cell never succeeds at being either thrilling or intriguing. If this stinker is one of the best films of the year, then this has been a sorry year for cinema indeed.
