"The Cell"

Tarsem Singh's opulent serial-killer thriller descends into special-effects hell.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Aug 18, 2000 | If "The Cell" were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows. Astonishing in places and generally pointless, it's unquestionably the special-effects champion of the summer. Although I found Bryan Singer's down-tempo "X-Men" quite agreeable, it was low-impact spectacle, as if meant to inaugurate some new age of Hollywood austerity in the post-"Matrix" era. Seizing his first feature film by the throat and choking it into a hallucinatory coma, commercial and music-video director Tarsem Singh (who has been known until now simply as Tarsem) quickly announces he's having none of that.

As we jerk and splash through the oversaturated fantasies encountered by therapist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) while exploring the brain of serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), Singh provides us with an unguided tour of the avant-garde film and visual art styles of the last 40 years. His facility for images is as remarkable as his range of references, and as memorably decadent as the operatic costumes by designer Eiko Ishioka. (Can you still call it Orientalism if the artist is actually Asian?) We go from dazzling screens of abstract animation -- a style of the '50s most famously appropriated in Stanley Kubrick's "2001" -- to the studied, pseudo-mystical iconography of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and the gruesome puppetry of the Brothers Quay, with its roots in the sadistic fables of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Then there's the erotic fetish photography of Helmut Newton, not to mention the sliced-and-diced livestock of English artist Damien Hirst and the medieval torture-garden aesthetic popularized by Clive Barker's "Hellraiser."

This is startling, even stunning, stuff; any devotee of stylized eye candy already understands that "The Cell" is a major event. But for all the opulence of its visual display, this movie has no vision. Of course most viewers won't catch most of Singh's references -- I'm sure I missed plenty myself -- but I think the sense that this is essentially a borrowed universe, a kind of pastiche, is unmistakable. As in one of Singh's videos or commercials, the delightful weightless sensation created by his outrageous imagery basically becomes its own reward: the visual equivalent of a crack hit. There are moments in "The Cell" when you'll almost forget that there's an ordinary genre movie going on outside Singh's fantasy world. Although that movie starts briskly and seems to crackle with energy and ideas, it rapidly devolves into standard serial-killer fare, depressingly short on imagination or vivid characterization.

"The Cell" will be compared to lots of other movies, but considered as a whole it doesn't live up to any of them. Unlike, say, "The Matrix" or "Brazil," it offers no coherent social critique or satire. Unlike "Silence of the Lambs" or "Seven," it fails to create and sustain a nightmare voyage into the self where outer and inner worlds eventually merge. Maybe it's tiresome to assume that a video director has no feeling for drama, but Singh certainly seems to care more about individual scenes than the architecture of his narrative. When his characters are in the real world, and not trapped amid tableaux of corpse-like dolls or pursued by androgynous samurai bodybuilders, he frankly seems bored.

Part of the problem here is Lopez, who has always struck me as a sweetie-pie and a knockout, but not an actress. She's able to play a nice girl, such as the friendly shrink who's trying to coax a brain-damaged boy out of his shell early in the film, and when needed she can call upon a kittenish but potent sexuality. But she's totally incapable of conveying anything grave or serious. When she tries to say a line like, "For severe schizophrenics there's no difference between fantasy and reality," she crinkles up her brow and looks sad, like Miss Nevada talking about world hunger, and you immediately stop listening. Anyway, Catherine functions more as a design element in Singh's patterns than a character; she's a wide-eyed Alice, all grown up but still plenty innocent, set adrift in a demonic wonderland.

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