Singh's questionable accomplishment is actually to generate more sympathy for the demented murderer than for the hero or heroine!
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I try to avoid other people's reviews before I write up a film for fear of their biasing my own reactions, but in the case of "The Cell" I couldn't escape two critiques. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times listed "The Cell" as one of his ten best films of 2000. Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle thought it was one of the worst. After watching the picture myself, I can understand both points of view. Parts of "The Cell" are gorgeous to look at, imaginative, and creative. Other parts, more numerous, are ugly and repugnant beyond compare. The problem for me was that none of the movie's visuals, beautiful or ugly, added up to anything.
The film is accompanied on the DVD by a documentary titled "Style As Substance." Fact is, "The Cell" is all style and no substance, a series of fancy images with no particular reason for being. The whole movie plays like a dream, and when it's over, one has about as much remembrance of it as a dream.
The movie's unexceptional serial-killer plot involves three people: The first is Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), a mental case who specializes in bizarre murders. He has done away with seven female victims by torturing and drowning them in a watertight cell, afterwards bleaching their bodies and turning them into monstrous dolls. This is among other things too gruesome to mention. The second character is Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), an almost faceless FBI agent who is on the killer's trail. The third is Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a young therapist who works for a medical institute that is experimenting on the transference of people's consciousness into the minds of others.
It's this last complication that takes the film into the realm of science fiction and provides the plot with its main thrust. You see, Novak and his men capture Stargher early on, but the killer has one last victim hidden away somewhere, and because he goes catatonic on them, he can't tell them where she is. Here, lurching convulsively about, D'Onofrio seems to be rehashing his bug role from "Men In Black," but it was better when he was playing it for laughs.
Anyway, Novak calls upon Ms. Deane to go into the killer's mind and try to worm the girl's location out of his tiny little brain cells. Trouble is, once inside Stargher's mind, she gets trapped there, and if she begins to think her dream world is real, she could die. Don't ask why. It has something to do with the old wives' tale that if you dream you're dying, you really might. So, we have not only Stargher's last victim trapped in a cell in the real world, we have Deane trapped in a cell in a dream world; thus, the movie's title. Eventually, Novak must also go into Stargher's mind, both to rescue Deane and to find the killer's victim before she is drowned by an automatic water system.
All of this is no more than a pretext to go into the murderer's fantasies and take a series of surrealistic, psychedelic trips through his head. Among the images Deane encounters in Stargher's private hell are the instant vivisection of a live horse, neatly compartmentalized into living, breathing slabs; a doll factory featuring the killer's victims in various grisly poses; a room full of clocks that actually sounds pretty good in surround audio; oriental motifs with vividly bright colors; a flying sequence, requisite since "The Matrix"; strange, Hieronymus Bosch-like shapes and objects; and literally tubs of blood. Some of the scenes are quite strikingly beautiful but most are simply grotesque. Indeed, director Tarsem Singh, known mainly for his music videos, seems intent merely in piling one appalling scene on another. As torture and abuse are the order of day, the movie operates mostly like an old-time carnival freak show. If that's your idea of a good time, "The Cell" may be just what you've ordered.
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[release]5890[/release]