Review of The Cell (2000) by Anthony K — 13 Aug 2017

The Cell is the directorial debut of Tarsem Singh, and it stars Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, and Vincent D'Onofrio in a science fiction horror about a killer that passes out until the police found him, but don't have a way of communicating with him, especially with a victim woman who's trapped, can't get out, and is on a time limit with the water flowing in to her.

There is a way to talk to the killer, and that's to go inside of his psyche from a machine that gets one of the crew members to go inside people's mind, see what they think of. I was curious to see this movie only to the fact that the Nostalgia Critic hated this film, and I knew that the director makes films that are style over substance.

So for me seeing the film for myself, and I didn't hate this, just only thought it was a wasted disappointment. The acting is fine, although Vincent D'Onofrio can be intimidating in some aspects, and a bit silly in others, which I pretty much think he's just having a lot of fun with this, and the effects do look really nice.

The premise of going inside a killer's mind is really fascinating and creepy that you would know why that person thinks the ways that they do when killing people. The only problem with that is that it doesn't go in a way that makes us invested in the killer's mind because we don't know anything about any characters, other then what they do, especially the killer, and when we get a little about the killer, it's not even enough, and I wanted a lot more.

The imagery that it has doesn't have much purpose being there, and when something creepy happens, I wasn't creeped out about it and was indifferent to what's happening. Some of the imagery would've been better off as paintings which would make sense of the visual way, but when you see that in the killer's mind without any reason behind that other then to make us make suggestions, it just come off as pretentious.

The climax was starting to get a little silly, and was wasting a bit of time when there's a woman who's slowly going to die. The Cell is one of those films that could've been so much more, and that it would've been a lot more effective if it was by a different director, whether it be David Fincher, even though science fiction is not quite his forte after Alien 3, David Lynch, or even Christopher Nolan as he almost did a premise like that called Inception where we go into the heroes' dreams, which is somewhat their psyche.

I do understand why people enjoy it as I wasn't bored in what I was seeing, but I also understand why people would hate it, I pretty much think it was an all right film.