The Cell (2000)
Average Rating: 5.3/10
Reviews Counted: 144
Fresh: 65 | Rotten: 79
The Cell offers disturbing, stunning eye candy, but it is undermined by a weak and shallow plotline that offers nothing new.
Average Rating: 4.5/10
Critic Reviews: 34
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 20
The Cell offers disturbing, stunning eye candy, but it is undermined by a weak and shallow plotline that offers nothing new.
liked it
Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 160,220
My Rating
Movie Info
In this science fiction thriller, child psychiatrist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) has developed a technique that allows her to travel through the minds of her patients. When Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), a multiple murderer who methodically drowns his victims and performs bizarre rituals with their bodies, falls into a coma, FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) asks Deane to enter the killer's psyche, in the hope of finding a missing girl whom Stargher has kidnapped; if she's not soon found,
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Cast
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Jennifer Lopez
Catherine Deane -
Vince Vaughn
Agent Peter Novak -
Vincent D'Onofrio
Carl Stargher -
Jake Weber
Agent Gordon Ramsey -
Dylan Baker
Henry West -
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Dr. Miriam Kent -
James Gammon
Dr. Theodore "Teddy" Le... -
Tara Subkoff
Julia Hickson -
Colton James
Edward Baines -
Patrick Bauchau
Lucien Baines -
Gareth Williams
Stargher's Father -
Pruitt Taylor Vince
Dr. Milton Reid -
Musetta Vander
Ella Baines -
Catherine Sutherland
Anne Marie Vicksey -
Jake Thomas
Young Carl Stargher -
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All Critics (146) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (68) | Rotten (80) | DVD (27)
Lopez is hard to take as the empathetic psychologist who uses a synaptic transfer machine to penetrate the comatose killer's tortured psyche in hopes of finding his latest victim.
Top CriticTarsem uses the dramatically shallow plot to create a dream world densely packed with images of beauty and terror that cling to the memory even if you don't want them to.
The major problem is that The Cell continuously echoes The Silence of the Lambs, only minus the intricate character interplay, Jonathan Demme's direction and the taut storyline.
The trippy, highly mannered, widely referential imagery is certainly its strongest selling point, despite wonderfully grounding (and, on the rides, bizarre) work by Lopez.
Had Tarsem stuck a Chanel bag or bottle of Calvin Klein perfume into the picture, he'd have ruined nothing.
One of the best films of the year.
A movie with no plot, no logic, no meaning.
Sigmund Freud's description of the id as "a cauldron full of seething excitations" could just as easily apply to this literal exploration into the darkest, filthiest corners of a serial killer's mind. A chilling journey into dark religious iconography.
A by-the-numbers story becomes the incidental backbone of one of the most visually arresting films of recent memory.
The dream sequences are so well-done that it's easy to forgive the film's lack of dramatic punch.
Lopez wades through many nonsensical, pompous, gradually annoying dream-logic scenes.
What could have been a by-the-numbers serial killer mystery becomes a beautiful tour de force of film magic.
Visually stunning, but rather pedestrian.
It's excellent.
It's not the villain but the director who seems most interested in these grisly spectacles. He was certainly uninterested in his characters.
The Cell may be another repellent serial killer movie, but at least it tries something different.
The cop/serial killer part of the story (written by Mark Protosevich) offers absolutely nothing of interest.
Writer Mark Protosevich and director Tarsem Singh, both making their feature debut, have crafted the year's first masterpiece, an insanely ambitious movie that miraculously fulfills every one of its ambitions.
This is a mind-bending acid trip of a movie -- fresh, disturbing and inimitable.
D'Onofrio proves that his performance as the bug-wearing-an-Edgar-suit in Men in Black was no fluke.
Audience Reviews for The Cell
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Director Tarsem Singh, who is mostly known from his popular music videos that has very unique visuals, surely makes this a good looking and entertaining to watch but nothing takes away the hollow storyline written by Mark Protosevich.
Acting is very average at some points and especially Jennifer Lopez's psychiatrist is not that believable as a character. I would say that the three leading elements of this film are the wonderfully experimental score by Howard Shore, fantastic costume design by talented Eiko Ishioka and April Ferry, and the outstanding production design by Tom Foden.
Tarsem knows how to make everything look good, but he is in a desperate need of a good screenplay.