Singh's 'The Cell', a lackluster postmodern horror flick

By Laksmi Pamuntjak

JAKARTA (JP): Was there ever a case of so much turning into so little? Far from heralding a new epoch in moviemaking, Tarsem Singh's directorial debut, The Cell, only proves that some people should just stick to their knitting.

And this also goes for star Jennifer Lopez; not since Elizabeth Shue in The Saint has the "brilliant-and-beautiful scientist" cliche fallen so flat on its face. One would suppose that the movie could have succeeded had at least one element worked, but in this case, none did. So what really went wrong?

Well, try the gist for a start.The Cell is basically Silence of the Lambs (lunatic kidnaps women, locks them up in a glass tank for forty hours, then drowns and bleaches them) as a 109 minute-long MTV video clip. Lopez, predictably, is the dumb down version of Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling.

Here, she plays a child psychologist who enters people's minds and tries to bring them out of their comas. Vincent D'Onofrio (Men in Black), who is scarier than anyone working in the movies today, is the "noncerebral" proletarian Hannibal, who merrily goes into a coma and offers his brain to Lopez to freely explore.

It's clear how Gen X-ers will find this a double whammy. Not only do they get to see J. Lo trapped in a muddled-up S & M world full of mutilated dolls, pasty corpses, and cut-up animal parts, but they also get to see Vincent D'Onofrio doing a John Malkovich (which is the ultimate act of sadomasochism, for both actor and audience).

Coming from Tarsem Singh, it's probably just as well. Best known for directing R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion video clip, this first time movie amateur makes no bones out of telling a story purely through visual effects.

If you accept this, then you may even enjoy the movie; the opening sequence, showing a virginal La Lopez on a sand dune, a beacon of sweetness and light in a selotonin-driven world, holds so much promise.

Admittedly, some of Singh's surreal mindscapes are eerily beautiful, and occasionally they even hit a raw nerve. However, it appears that whenever this happens he pulls out all the stops. Stranger still, he doesn't seem to do it in service of the plot either.

When the spooky dreamworlds take their Kit Kat break and we're thrown back to the real-life narrative, we are usually forced to readjust our focus and empathize with real characters who should be guiding us to the thriller's conclusion. Yet in the absence of - yes, that dreaded word - character development, "reality" seems as unreal and as ungainly as a comatose one.

So much acting potential is squandered on droll, meaningless dialog and poor characterization. Vince Vaughn (Psycho II, Swingers) and Jake Weber (Meet Joe Black), playing FBI agents in pursuit of the serial killer, are both strong, charismatic actors, yet they cannot save the movie. Even Marianne Jean Baptiste, whose estuarine English accent usually offers a bit of perspective when the going gets too corny, seems as lackluster and eggheaded as the rest of the cast.

Of course, having a strong lead would be remotely helpful, but Jennifer Lopez seems to think that portraying goodness is equal to sighing or purring her lines throughout the entire movie; every time she's finished saying something, you'd half expect to see a huge teardrop running through her chiseled cheek. At least she's found a new persona: the Latina Melanie Griffith.

On a more fundamental level, a thriller cannot run on visual imagination alone. Tarsem Singh's movie doesn't even have the courage of its own cliches; he piles the absurdities on with such speed - a nod to The Matrix, another to Silence of the Lambs, another to old-fashioned Law and Order detective routine - but never for a moment convincingly. Worse, even in the ensuing numbing ordeal, you do have time to notice how dusty and unoriginal his themes are. "My father abused me, so I unleash my vengeance upon the world." Check. "Whey-hey, you have a multiple personality disorder - here, let me bring out your softer side". Check. "We are embarking on a risky, unprecedented, life-changing project." Check.

Not that all cliches are bad. Originality is hardly a virtue in Hollywood, and the familiar accouterments of a genre can be a source of comfort. But for the parts to work, they have to be brought together in a way that tells you something. Even the visual images, weighted down by the staccato editing, freaky iconography, and fuzzy psychoanalytic parallels, do not add up to a coherent whole. Blood and gore predominate, but, like everything else, Singh uses them like garnish - a sprinkle here, a sprinkle there, sometimes lots of them everywhere.

There's a particularly revolting scene in which a long bloodied worm is slowly wringed out of a stab wound in Vince Vaughn's body, and there is La Lopez looming friskily somewhere near, decked out in John Galliano on speed. It's one thing saying they have an unconsummated relationship and quite another saying they are on such different planets they shouldn't even be in the same movie.

Worse, this aimless pairing continues up to the climax, in which Vaughn, the archetypal everyman hero, desperately and singularly tries to save the killer's last victim, while Lopez desperately and singularly Virgin Mary-ies her way to save the soul of the killer's inner child.

At the end, The Cell is, at best, a glossed-up B movie disguised as a postmodern horror icon, and is about as resonant as a puny little cell in the universe, drowned out by its own insignificance.