The Cell (2000)

The Cell 

It's difficult to sell a serial killer movie these days. Audiences want another "Silence of the Lambs" or a "Se7en" but more often than not end up with scripts some second-under-sub-assistant-co-producer was using to keep his kitchen table sturdy. They're a way to win a box office for a weekend or two and usually fade away without much recognition. "The Cell" is along the lines of those flicks only this time there's a real effort made on part of the director and producers to come up with something original and shocking - they accomplish that but that doesn't make it a great movie.

This film is basically your run-of-the-mill mystery thriller about cops and the Feds trying to track down a really sick and twisted serial killer. The story wastes no time with a lot of details and instead just jumps right in to the authorities' hunt for the madman and within two or three scenes they've already tracked him down. We already know who he is - a nutty loner with a penchant for drowning women and turning them into his own personal dolls. He's one of the most mentally disturbed villains I've ever seen in a movie (and that includes supernatural horror flicks). The guy gets off on dangling his own flesh from chains while watching his victims die.

Of course for every bad guy there has to be a hero or at least a few wannabe/mini-heroes that add up to one almighty solver of the problem. Jennifer Lopez plays Catherine Deane, a child psychologist who can literally enter the mind of other people in a really high-tech futuristic lab that only exists in sci-fi movies and the like. Vince Vaughn is FBI Agent Peter Novak - a relatively weak character without much motivation other than the generic story of how a criminal walked on a technicality and he's dedicated his life to making sure that doesn't happen again. Somehow Novak and his crew learn of Deane's process and want to use it on the killer who is in a deep catatonic state when they catch him. There's a lot of jive about how he suffers from a rare form of schizophrenia and he'll never snap out of it. That sucks because there's one more still-living victim to be found and she'll die if they can't find out where she is. Put two and two together and you've suddenly got a journey into the mind of a madman on the slight chance they might be able to reach his logical side for a moment to discover the girl's location.

Now that that's said and done we can get to what the REAL point of the film is - the dream sequences. Actually it isn't so much a dream as it is an exploration of the subconscious. The human mind is a strange and fascinating thing we'll never be able to understand fully, which means if you're going to make a movie about the inside of a killer's mind it's a license to go hog wild. At least "The Cell" succeeds on this level. For large bulks of time it's basically a filmed acid trip - an animated M.C. Escher or Salvidor Dalî painting. It's sci-fi, horror, fantasy and drama all mixed into one. There's a lot of disturbing, creepy images that go beyond S&M and are just plain psychotic. It's shocking and it's not - shocking because the art direction and production design are so meticulous in detail to convey such an atmosphere that would and should be terrifying if it didn't seem like such a cliche horror movie set. We see what made the killer who and what he is and we're supposed to feel sorry for him.

What keeps the film from being great is that this is pretty much all it has going for it. There's virtually no characterization and the screenplay is pretty mediocre. How the mind transferring process works isn't explained (and should be because the reality of the film is the same as our own, it's not like the reality from "The Crow" or something). Lopez's character doesn't seem like a psychology professional at all, just a cartoony heroine. Vaughn's character at least has some built-in motivation due to the fact he's an FBI agent and the case is personal to him (has there ever been a movie where the FBI didn't take the case personally?). All the supporting characters are simply pawns with no apparent free will of their own - they just do whatever Lopez and Vaughn tell them to.

Their purpose of going into the killer's mind is to find the girl's location - they don't learn that directly. Instead, a symbol in his mind points out something to the detectives and starts a chain reaction. Had they done better police work to begin with the whole mind-meld thing wouldn't have been necessary in the first place (but then the film would only be about 10 minutes long).

Although "The Cell" has something of an original plot and direction going for it, the screenplay is too weak and cannot support it. There's a lot of interesting stuff to look at here but it's mostly gratuitous art direction.

GRADE: C+ 

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