THE CELL

by Gary Susman

Can we please, please, please have a moratorium on serial-killer movies? Okay, The Silence of the Lambs was good a decade ago, but since then, serial-killer movies have been less about exploring the nature of evil (or psychosis) than about turning torture into entertainment, less about finding the humanity within their characters (sleuths and victims as well as murderers) than about inventing striking new displays of cruelty.

The Cell is the nadir of this trend so far. It purports to go beyond previous entries in the genre by depicting the actual thoughts and imagination of its bogeyman, a killer of young women named Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) who slowly drowns his victims as a prelude to even more-perverse treatment. When agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) captures him, Carl falls into a coma before he can reveal where he's trapped his last victim. Peter enlists Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist whose virtual-reality device allows her to enter the minds of comatose patients, to probe Carl's brain for the tank's location while there's still time to save the woman. Once inside his mind, Catherine finds a vivid, baroque world of images, memories, and horrors from which she herself may not be able to escape.

Not that the movie has any actual interest in Carl's psychology, which, despite D'Onofrio's genuinely creepy performance, proves banal and cliché'd. (His father, a backwoods fundamentalist, beat him and may have sexually abused him.) In fact, thanks to the plot holes in the sketchy script by rookie screenwriter Mark Protosevich, the trip into Carl's mind is superfluous, since Peter uncovers through ordinary detective work all the clues he needs to find the hidden victim. The script doesn't even bother to give Peter and Catherine any personality traits. Lopez proved she can act in Out of Sight, but here she's just a beautiful doll to be dressed up in lavish, imaginative costumes (by Eiko Ishioka, who won an Oscar for her work in Bram Stoker's Dracula) and posed in striking tableaux of menacing kink.

The film's visuals are stunning, even lovely at times, as long as you can ignore their depravity. First-time feature director Tarsem Singh, whose lush parade of images inspired by religious and folk art will be familiar to viewers of his commercials and music videos (including R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion"), has innovative style to spare, but what kind of achievement is it to come up with glorious lighting and arresting composition in order to photograph a naked, blood-soaked corpse? The Cell's combination of gory misanthropy, state-of-the-art visual effects, and reverence for art's Old Masters (one literally gut-wrenching torture sequence is shown later to have been inspired by a centuries-old painting, as if to absolve the filmmakers of being morally bankrupt enough to have conceived this image themselves) suggests Kiss the Girls as directed by Peter Greenaway for MTV. It's the feel-disgusted movie of the summer. At Cinema World, Entertainment Cinemas, Gardner, the Hoyt Westborough, Leominster, Natick, the Solomon Pond Hoyt, and the Worcester North Showcase.