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Critics Consensus: The Cell offers disturbing, stunning eye candy, but it is undermined by a weak and shallow plotline that offers nothing new.
Critic Consensus: The Cell offers disturbing, stunning eye candy, but it is undermined by a weak and shallow plotline that offers nothing new.
All Critics (145) | Top Critics (33) | Fresh (66) | Rotten (79) | DVD (12)
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.
Tarsem 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 Cell becomes the first serial killer feature in a long time to take the genre in a new direction.
One of the best films of the year.
[The visuals are] just enough to recommend a movie that otherwise has nothing new to offer.
The trippy, highly mannered, widely referential imagery is certainly its strongest selling point, despite wonderfully grounding (and, on the rides, bizarre) work by Lopez.
Rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.
The Cell is a dazzling mind-bender of a film that features spectacular visuals from the elegant sets to the gorgeous costumes, all encompassed in a thrilling story that will have you on the edge of your seat.
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.
It is certainly a gorgeous film to look at but the plot is weakened by the fact that Jennifer Lopez is seriously miscast and not at all convincing as a psychiatrist well suited for her job, especially given how the character's motivations are so unprofessional and confusing in the last act.
Super Reviewer
Visually stunning but thematically scant take on what it would be like to enter another's psyche, in this case a serial (psycho/sexual) killer whose last victim is still trapped in a cell somewhere. Lopez and D'Onofrio are competent as antagonists delivering the drama but Vaughn is very good in this, his least Vaughn-like of roles.
I really do admire Tarsem's The Cell for it's amazing nightmare sequences. However, the hit-or-miss casting and lack of interest make this a lot worse than it theoretically should be. While Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn are fine on their own, this miscasting wasn't beneficial to either of their strengths. Thankfully Vincent D'Onofrio's complete tour-de-force makes the movie as intriguing as it is, making you want to see nothing but a two hour dream sequence with him being bizarre. The visuals are landmarks for their time, mainly because it avoids heavy CGI and focuses on optical illusions. When I think about it, these were some of the best "dream sequences" i've ever seen. They were so visually and stylistically unsettling and surreal.
This was sort of interesting.
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