The Cell

Yes, you'll feel like you're locked up in one, too. If you have a hankering to see a bunch of mutilated corpses, then by all means rush right out to see “The Cell,” the new Jennifer Lopez vehicle which has so much wrong with it that it’s hard to know where to begin. If not, then I suggest you stay home, since the picture doesn’t have much else to recommend it. An ill-conceived and uneasy mix of pedestrian police procedural and science fiction thriller, “The Cell” goes nowhere slowly, and manages to turn about a hundred million bucks worth of visual effects into an experience that takes a back seat to any rural carnival. Taken rather a bit too much with itself, the movie at once repels and irritates, while fashioning a visual style that already seems passé. Tarsem Singh, reputed to be a gifted director of commercials, demonstrates for one and all that sensibilities which may work wonders selling soda pop to teenagers have little to do with constructing an entertaining or coherent feature narrative. Mark Protosevich’s lumbering, doleful script draws freely from a host of other--and mostly better--pictures. Not the least of these is the brilliant “The Silence of the Lambs,” with its woman-in-jeopardy while we try to catch the killer motif.

Except instead of Jodie Foster’s FBI Agent Clarice Starling doing the heavy lifting, we have Lopez’s child psychologist Catherine Deane. The change is not a good one. Lopez, who was sexy, smart and strong in the terrific “Out of Sight,” is rendered whispery and depressed in the new picture, and even her fans are bound to be disappointed. It seems Catherine has helped perfect a new technology (and yes, they spend way to much time blabbing about the technology) for getting inside the mind of comatose or catatonic patients. As luck would have it, mad serial killer Carl Stargher (D’Onofrio, a good actor whose career may never recover from this awful outing) lapses into just such a coma (he is victim of some ludicrous sounding disease which has got to be an invention; at least, I’ve never heard of it) right after confining his latest victim in the “Cell” of the title. (And by the way, naming the entire movie after one piece of the bad guy’s equipment is yet another of the many miscalculations the picture makes.) Whew, good thing we have the plucky and empathic Dr. Deane--who teams up with a morose FBI Agent named Peter (Vaughn)--to venture into the bad guy’s mind.

Wearing a rubbery sensory suit that is simultaneously ugly and sexy, Catherine goes inside the killer’s head to learn the location of the trapped girl before it is too late. Once inside Stargher’s mind, we are not one bit surprised to find that his world is full of hideous visions and fantasies. While much has been made of the grotesque imagery of “The Cell,” the effects are actually more enervating than disgusting. Singh compounds the error by adding a lot of film stock and lighting effects that do more to irritate the audience than frighten it. In fact, some portions of the visual effects--designed, I suppose, to represent the mad visions of a lunatic--seem an awfully lot like outtakes from the Pink Floyd Laser Light Show at the Hayden Planetarium, circa 1975. This kind of junk filler may serve well to hawk cars and candy bars, but it’s a bit shoddy for Hollywood in this day and age. A soundtrack that sounds like the inside of a machine shop doesn’t help the time go by any easier, either.

The problem with insane killers in the movies (and I am hardly the first to make this observation) is that they are so... crazy. They are so far out on the fringe that making any kind of human connection is impossible for the audience, because the good guys might as well be hunting a rabid squirrel. Stargher isn’t even a particularly smart or inventive madman; he is a just a bogeyman with delusions of grandeur. Furthermore, the revelation that he was-- gosh!--abused as a child hardly makes him any more sympathetic, and it doesn’t go very far towards explaining or excusing his penchant for drowning women and then raping their dead bodies. Ironically, after all the huffing and puffing inside of Stargher’s twisted consciousness, the rescue of the last victim has a lot more to do with plain, boring detective work than any high-falutin’ mind-transfer technology (the script’s strenuous statement to the contrary notwithstanding). I hate to say it, but except for the good old-fashioned butt-whipping that Catherine gets to deliver to Stargher in the penultimate scene, she doesn’t contribute that much. If this is female empowerment in the year 2000, we’ve got a ways to go. (I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that Lopez is not subjected to a scene of gratuitous nudity in the movie; on the other hand, that may eliminate a main reason for seeing it.) Likewise, Tarsem Singh has a ways to go until he realizes that a good picture needs a good script, and, in the end, how you shoot the damned thing is a lot less important than what it is you’re shooting. (8/22/2000)