Seeing "The Cell" it's like seeing a very long Nine Inch Nails/ Marilyn Manson music video with a shoehorned serial killer story : While I have to admit that some of the images displayed in this movie are actually impressive or fascinating to look at (Some scenes depicting the mental world of the serial killer are both beautiful and disturbing) the truth is that the main plot of the film is not interesting at all, being mostly shallow and filled with many clichés and stereotypes that have been done too many times before. In fact, almost all the events that take place in "The Cell" seem just "excuses" in order to show lots of weird imagery, combined with some forced symbolism that actually doesn't have very much to do with the plot in order to give this a "deep" appearance.
Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn are pretty unconvincing in their respective roles, being the main reason of why I have hard time trying to care about their characters. Only Vincent D'Onofrio makes a decent effort in order to portray in a convincing his twisted character, despite all the amount of clichés concerning to the personality of the serial killer.
And that's the main reason of why "The Cell" doesn't work. If a movie doesn't have a good story and the characters are uninteresting, not even the best visuals can save it. The overall weakness of the plot ruins all the effect that the impressive images have, making this a shallow experience, despite all the violence and disturbing content. Unfortunately, the excessive focus in the style rather than in the substance seems to be a common characteristic of the movies directed by Tarsem Singh, were the splendid visuals are overshadowed by the extremely weak scripts. At least in "The Fall", I was able to care about the main characters, and the plot wasn't as boring and pretentious as in this movie.
Even with all the nightmarish content that it had "The Cell" was a forgettable experience for me.
Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn are pretty unconvincing in their respective roles, being the main reason of why I have hard time trying to care about their characters. Only Vincent D'Onofrio makes a decent effort in order to portray in a convincing his twisted character, despite all the amount of clichés concerning to the personality of the serial killer.
And that's the main reason of why "The Cell" doesn't work. If a movie doesn't have a good story and the characters are uninteresting, not even the best visuals can save it. The overall weakness of the plot ruins all the effect that the impressive images have, making this a shallow experience, despite all the violence and disturbing content. Unfortunately, the excessive focus in the style rather than in the substance seems to be a common characteristic of the movies directed by Tarsem Singh, were the splendid visuals are overshadowed by the extremely weak scripts. At least in "The Fall", I was able to care about the main characters, and the plot wasn't as boring and pretentious as in this movie.
Even with all the nightmarish content that it had "The Cell" was a forgettable experience for me.