Overall Rating
 Awesome: 19.9%
Worth A Look: 22.96%
Average: 14.29%
Pretty Bad: 18.88%
Total Crap: 23.98%
12 reviews, 124 user ratings
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| Cell, The |
by Erik Childress
"Style Over Substance Personified"
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Just because you see something in a movie you’ve never seen before doesn’t make it a good movie. If you saw a duck take a dump off the top of the Sears tower and hit Richard Roeper in the head, would that immediately make it a good movie? Well, maybe. What if you had to pay eight bucks to see it? Well, maybe you were getting a bargain. My point is that visuals alone does not a good movie make. When we witness a new variation of fireworks introduced into the regular routine, we say “cool”, but then we move on, looking for a little more substance with our flash. Such is the case with The Cell, which grabs its audience for a little while, but then quickly bores by becoming nothing more than flash over substance.Jennifer Lopez plays Catherine Deane, a child psychologist specially chosen for experimentation with a young boy who is catatonic due to some dead seals. By slipping into Vlad the Impaler’s red battle armor from Coppola’s Dracula adaptation and then suspending herself like the bodies in Coma, Deane is able to enter the mind of a young boy like Dennis Quaid in Dreamscape. Enter the hunt for serial killer Carl Stagher (Vincent D’Onofrio, in yet another interesting portrayal of craziness and evil), a schizophrenic who likes to kidnap his victims and then videotape them a bulletproof-sealed prison that slowly fills up with water after forty hours. How the FBI determines this timeframe from the videotapes they find is never delved into? Is it forty hours from the time of capture? How much time is left once the water starts? Did Carl use five T-160/8-hour tapes on EP to record the moment? Regardless, after Carl is caught and deemed a vegetable for all eternity, Catherine is recruited by the FBI to help find a missing seventh girl by going, literally, into the mind of a killer. So instead of using good old-fashioned police work, the FBI decides to use this so far successful, but result-hindered technology. All this sarcastic ribbing, of course, occurred mostly after I left the theater, because up to this point, The Cell has passed itself off as a reasonably good, stylized thriller with the promise of something extraordinary to come. And for a while, it does. The first trip inside Carl’s twisted head is a fascinating trip, highlighted by extraordinary moments involving a horse and a sideshow of his victims. But then, the movie seems to doubleback on itself, rehashing things we’ve already seen and creating a mass of unexplored ideas.
Just as The Cell was starting to overwhelm me, it eventually turned around to annoy me. The cerebral sequences get less and less interesting and absolutely no suspense is created because the mindtrips become too calm and pretty in tone for us to get seriously tensed up. Visuals become nothing more than visuals if you don’t have any substance to its surroundings and I’m not going to give a positive review to a film that has nice architecture. The Cell was directed by music video helmer, Tarsem (Singh), who is well known for his inventive take on R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” video. Tarsem seems right for music videos, a world that uses creative visuals to either enhance or divert people’s attention away from the lyrics and melody. But a 4-minute video is a far cry from the world of feature films and Tarsem (who has stated in interviews that he isn’t interested in plot) should stay away.
How far Tarsem may have strayed from the script is left to question, but the material in-between the headgames leaves a lot more to question. First of all, it bothered me on its handling of the serial killer. Once again, an abusive childhood is used as the scapegoat for what causes him to kill. Now, I understand that a problematic childhood (which I’m sure most of us have had in some way) can fashion the way one thinks or acts later in life. If little Carl’s father caused big Carl to simply go introvert and sport a giant doll collection, I would feel sorry for him. But when you kidnap, torture, kill and bleach six women and then hang yourself on chains to look down on them and get your jollies off, you’ve lost my sympathy and it’s time to take you out of the game. These thoughts are discussed in a quiet moment between Lopez and Vaughn, but never brought up again. Plus, what’s the point of trying to make us feel sorry for the supervillain and his “inner child” crap if you’re just going to resort to becoming a Highlander and having a showdown with his “inner demon”? Ultimately, the screenplay doesn’t even allow Lopez to find out where the girl is. It’s left up to another party on a single trip to Carl’s psyche to discover a clue that was visible upon his initial capture. The camera even lingers on it early in the film for several seconds, but I guess it’s too much to ask the trained members of the FBI to keep up with the audience.
The very least The Cell could have provided was some good terror. Other than the mysterious uncharted territory of the first Carl linkup, I was never scared nor thrilled once. And when I say scared, I’m talking about a general sense of uneasiness. Suspense. Horror is not just about the “boo” moments with a synthesized “stinger” that can make audience members jump out of their seat. Anyone can do that. I’m talking about what David Fincher did in Seven or what William Friedkin did in The Exorcist. Horror or psychological terror isn’t about the “boo”, it’s about the overall feeling. The Cell could have at least taken that cue from the greats in the genre. After all, it lifted so many things from so many other movies from the aforementioned costumes and ideas to visuals like the giant staircases (found in both Dreamscape and Labyrinth). Even the film’s score seems to borrow many of the same notes from the soundtrack of The Silence of the Lambs. And why not since it was composed by the same person – Howard Shore.With all the press surrounding the visual style of The Cell, it’s natural to expect something incredible and some of the images work, but many have already left me. If you want to see a film done right with sights that will both amaze and haunt you coupled with a story and characters you want to see through to the end, check out Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come. That vision had more visual stimuli than anything seen in the plot-challenged Tarsem’s The Cell. Tarsem, a word of advice, go paint a picture or go back to music videos and stay away from the movies.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4392&reviewer=198
originally posted: 08/21/00 10:11:19
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USA
18-Aug-2000
UK
N/A
Australia
16-Nov-2000 (M)
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