Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D'Onofrio Director: Tarsem Singh
Rating: R16 (violence, sexual themes, content may disturb)
Running Time: 108 mins
Screening: Village cinemas
Review: Russell Baillie
There's no doubt that this sci-fi phantasmagoria, which has Jennifer Lopez's therapist touring the colourful mind of a comatose serial killer
through an experimental electro-neurological gizmo, is quite a looker.
It's a real eye-popper all right. In his debut feature, Tarsem Singh - a big-name music clip and advertising director - won't let a mundane shot go by, even out in the real world.
But as a story, it's a clunker and a generally nasty piece of work, a grim knock-off of Seven and Silence of the Lambs exacerbated by Singh's imagery overload that heaps everything from Damien Hirst to the florid look of Bollywood musicals into its scenes depicting the killer's mental territory.
By the end of the film, the feeling is that you've been trapped in a long-form Marilyn Manson video. Really quite creepy, but tedious with it.
For a movie based on supposedly cutting-edge techniques for examining the mind, it's singularly lacking in psychological nous, whether in the single-dimension characters of Lopez's therapist, Vaughn's FBI guy, D'Onofrio's killer, or its contemplation of what is spectacularly wrong in the latter's cerebral wiring.
Then again, a film which represents a madman's "inner child" with, well, an inner child, isn't obviously too worried about creating its own mental challenges.
Still, it does manage to build up some pace in its against-the-clock hunt to find a woman the killer has abducted and hidden in a remote spot, while still alive.
But that's really only there for the designer hallucinations which, while making it a visual wonder, will leave many in two minds about whether The Cell's own brain contains anything other but over-active optic nerves.
