The Cell

Try to imagine yourself in the following situation. You've been hired as a set designer for a motion picture with a pretty hefty budget. You know little about the directions that your director, Tarsem Singh, is going to take this film. You, the director, the costume designer, the makeup artist, and the special effects supervisor are all seated around a large table in a Hollywood studio's office. As Mr. Singh outlines his plans for his visual plans for the film, you slowly realize that you may have a gold, bald-headed statuette sitting on your desk at home come March. Singh is giving you free reigns to do make whatever your imagination can devise, anything that the budget can contain, as long as it is equal parts surreal, extravagant, gothic, and quirky. It's the stuff that set designers dream of. You smile.

Fast forward your life a year and a half. Your work is done. You've created sets that are surreal, extravagant, gothic, and quirky. Your friends, the director, the costume designer, the makeup artist, and the special effects supervisor all have done their jobs equally well. Upon seeing the finished product of the film on the screen in a cold, dark theater on the studio's lot, you realize that you and some of your friends will probably have that gold, bald-headed statuette. You've done your job well. But after seeing it, you realize that somebody else didn't. They didn't perform their job well. That person, you realize, is the scriptwriter.

The Cell is debut filmmaker Tarsem Singh's lush, lively examination of the human mind and the extents that people will go to understand it. Singh's film is a visual spectacle that almost makes up for the script's inability to create characters that we care about. Almost. At year's end it will most certainly be remembered as the most visually entrancing film of the past twelve months, but those plaudits alone do not make it an exceptional film.

It's easy to forget that it takes almost a full hour for the film to finally become the mind-trip that was so wistfully showcased in the trailers. It's also easy to forget that the multiple storylines that eventually play out in the end really don't have any influence on each other, thus lowering their dramatic impact.

The storyline follows the ventures of Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) into the minds of comatose patients. Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) is a mass murderer who suffers from a rare form of schizophrenia. He's made out to be the most clearly psychotic character I've seen in a long time. He sings morbid rhymes while soaking in the bathtub, he suffers convulsions that can only be cured with aspirin, and most disturbing of all, he hangs himself eight feet above the floor from rings that he has planted into the skin of his back in some type of painful ritual. It's not a pleasant sight to see. Investigating the mysterious killings and trying to save Stargher's latest victim is Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn ), an FBI detective.

In a slick screenwriting move, the three are brought together. When Catherine finally enters into his mind we're treated to eye-candy of the highest quality. When she exits his mind we're left with bloated dialogue and characters that we don't care for.

There are some electrifying scenes, most of them involving the mind's need to establish reality and the consequences involved in making Carl Stargher's world that reality. There are some deft moves, and the script's whole point seems to allow Tarsem to develop his vision of Stargher's mind. For that, I am thankful. With Tarsem's vision at such a cutting-edge level, The Cell rarely is boring. Such revolutionary and gruesome sights are welcome after so much generic garbage has been spewed from Hollywood so far this year. It's nice to see a filmmaker that is willing to take a gamble and create such a visually risky film as his first foray into big budgets and exhaustive studio productions. It's that kind of action that Hollywood desperately needs. It's just too bad that we couldn't have had a more compelling story to feel, so we can stop staring at the sets and the costumes.

On a scale of 1 to 10 eighty-foot capes : 5