THE CELL
Not weird enough!

  Damn that Jennifer Lopez!  I wish she'd dry up, crumble into dust and blow away.  At least Britney Spears has the good grace to stay in one pop medium but noooo, Lopez has to sing badly AND act badly.  At least in this movie, we don't have to look at her ass all that much.  I, for one, am quite tired of Jennifer Lopez's ass, and doubly tired of her pointing it at every camera that comes near her.  It's nowhere near as interesting as she seems to think it is, and nowhere near as huge as the jokes I keep hearing.  It's just a totally unremarkable ass.

So, Jennifer Lopez and that mostly off-screen ass star here as Catherine Deane, a child psychologist who is experimenting into contacting coma patients by entering (via drugs and a VR bodysuit that looks like Vlad's muscle-armor from Coppola's Dracula movie) the mind of the comatose child.  Anyway, she's soon contacted by the FBI, in particular Peter Novak (Vince Vaughan), who have caught up to a nasty serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) about ten minutes too late; there's still one more victim out there somewhere, presumably still alive, but the killer's gone into a coma from which he is not going to return, barring some sort of divine intervention.  Novak asks Deane to, well, do what she does to try to gain the killer's trust from inside his head and find out where that girl is kept.

The basic problem with The Cell is its serial killer thriller plot skeleton.  This is a particularly simple-minded and routine story for this kind of thing, with its revelations coming too easily ("He wants to be caught!" says Novak at one point, which I guess happens a lot in real life, but makes for pretty weak storytelling) and telegraphed with screamingly loud obviousness.  (minor spoiler alert) When you think about it, Deane doesn't actually do a single thing to help that trapped girl, except screw up and need rescuing. (end spoiler alert)  Yeah, this guy's a twisted, sick bastard, not like we haven't seen a zillion other twisted sick bastards killing girls in the movies before.  In a slightly novel twist, this guy suspends himself by hooks through rings in his back over the naked bodies of his victims, presumably masturbating though it's hard to tell when it's kept off-screen.  Cute.

The occasional looks at how his trapped victim is faring are a little more effective.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn't give us a lot to go on here; remember how a similar situation was handled in The Silence Of The Lambs; the we actually got to know the victim through her parents, through her actions, through her attempts to communicate with her captor.  Here, we learn her name and watch her panic for a while.

But the strength in The Cell is in its trips into people's heads.  The idea isn't all that new; it lies somewhere between Dreamscape and Greg Bear's Queen Of Angels, but it's a good bet that you've never seen it in a movie quite like this.  This guy's mind is like a big messy S&M fantasy which has seen a lot of pro wrestling, Tool videos, Blade Runner, and good ol' Inquisition-era "purification through pain" equipment, all shot with the good ol' grain we all miss from horror days of yore.  I particularly liked the guy's throne room, which has him parked between two giant tonsils while the cape flowing from his back spans the entire room.

And yet, even with all that, I found myself a shade disappointed with what was going on in people's minds.  It's too bad that a movie with so many cool ideas about the human mind (or, at least, cool visualizations of old ideas) gives them all a back seat to a dopey serial killer plot.  Some of what we see, once given context, isn't nearly as nifty as it might have suggested in the ads.

For that matter, I'm a little confused as to the logic of things.  There's one scene where Deane goes into the killer's mind, but her first experience of it has her believing she's still in the real world (oh no, it's the "we're still inside the game!" cliché!).  If this is inside the (comatose) killer's head, how does he know anything about the real world of the institute in which this experiment is taking place?  Maybe something was explained when I ran to use the can.

Acting's fine by everybody except the two leads; Lopez isn't capable of being anybody other than Lopez, and Vaughan hasn't shed that "look at those beautiful babies!" taint which has made him so annoying since Swingers.  The meatiest role I've seen him capable of carrying is bit-part comic relief; watching him try to play a role like this is like watching a garter snake trying to swallow a La-Z-Boy.  Why won't they just go away?  I want them to go away.

The Cell was directed by Tarsem Duomdwar, who had the "Duomdwar" removed in a lot of the promo material, for reasons unknown.  Now the promo stuff says "Tarsem Singh", which I guess is easier to pronounce.  Tarsem is an MTV grad, and I think shows a lot more promise than his fellow former video directors; I mean, could you imagine Michael Bay having the guts to show us half the weird stuff in this movie?  (could you imagine Michael Bay having the guts to show us anything that wasn't scientifically demonstrated to have maximum cross-demographic appeal?)

The eye candy's great, and there are enough ideas behind it to give your head something to chew on for a while too.  Too bad the rest of the movie doesn't offer anything else.

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