Main cast: Jennifer Lopez (Catherine Deane), Vince Vaughn (Peter Novak), Jake Weber (Special Agent Gordon Ramsey), Dylan Baker (Henry West), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Dr Miriam Kent), Tara Subkoff (Julia Hickson), Catherine Sutherland (Anne Marie Vicksey), Colton James (Edward Baines), Musetta Vander (Ella Baines), Patrick Bauchau (Lucien Baines), and Vincent D’Onofrio (Carl Stargher)
Director: Tarsem Singh
Its The Silence of the Lambs pretensions aside, The Cell is actually a very stylish, nice-to-look-at eye candy. It’s like an arty fashion ad. Jennifer Lopez stands proud and regal, statuesque, long red scarves flowing around her like a diva from another dimension. Beautiful.
The plot is simple: Catherine Deane is a doctor/therapist/something who works as some sort of empath. She “travels” into coma patients’ minds to coax them into awakening, so to speak, with the aid of some high-tech gizmos that require her to wear body-hugging latex. When a psycho falls into a coma, the FBI lead by Peter Novak asks her to probe into the man’s mind. Objective? To discover the location of the psycho’s latest victim in less than a day.
The psycho loves to kill women by drowning them and then bleaching them into dolls. Hence Catherine finds herself in some surreal kingdom of colors and Nightmare on Elm Street-like overtones. Can she succeed?
Does it matter? Oh, the surreal overtones. Every element of The Twilight Zone, Friday the 13th, and Hellraiser series is ripped off shamelessly, resulting in beautifully colorful amalgamation of haphazard, random bursts of chaotic scenes. It’s arty in a very low brow manner.
Jennifer Lopez makes a brilliant statuesque figure, although she is annoying in that she never speaks above a squeak in this movie. Vince Vaughn is laughable as an obsessed dude – come on, I can see what he really wants is to dive into Catherine’s lacy undies.
But never mind the lack of substance or even coherency. The Cell is beautiful to look at. Think of it as a very expensive advertisement for, oh, I don’t know – an art gallery?
