The Cell is a movie for those who enjoy fairly decent sets and special effects, plus the occasional bit of inspired cinematography (as during the opening credits) — coupled with a not-very-clear story, lots of nude female cadavers, a bit of necrophilia now and then, and occasional chunks of grue, gore, and just plain bad language. WARNING: You will probably appreciate this movie more if you have never read a fifty-two-year-old science-fiction story “Dreams Are Sacred” by Peter Phillips, or seen its somewhat more recent BBC 2 adaptation; Phillips treated much the same subject matter in a lighter, more amusing, shorter, and considerably less ham-handed way. There is nothing new under the sun …

You see, there is this very rich family whose son has gone into a catatonic state, for reasons which were never quite clear to me (either he is autistic, or he saw some seals being clubbed to death, or something …). So they have financed a project which will allow a special operator, a former social worker named Catharine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), to enter his mind and attempt to lead him back into something resembling what we laughingly call “normality”. Enter, however, the FBI, which has long been on the track of a really, really sick (even in the purely medical sense of the term!) serial killer named Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio). Just as they catch up to him — and while his latest victim is hidden away somewhere in a bobby-trapped cell that will kill her within a few hours — the super-schizoid Stargher withdraws permanently and irrevocably into his own mind, leaving agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) no way to question the fellow. So guess who gets pressured into going sump-diving into Stargher’s mind in an attempt to convince his suspicious subconscious to tell how to rescue the missing girl. Guess what happens when she does. Guess who has to go in and rescue her. And guess how he actually solves the case through legwork (somebody else’s) and inspired deduction, based on something he sees in Stargher’s mind that he could just as easily have seen without ever leaving Bakersfield, CA.

One reviewer enthusiastically compares this movie to Event Horizon. I find this comparison apt, though without the enthusiasm.

Again, some of the cinematography is beautiful, and there are also some excellent sets and special effects. This is not always a good thing; the excellent animated screen borders during the Queen’s Garden scene certainly distracted my attention from the ongoing dialogue between Catharine and the Young Carl.

Not a movie I expect to see again. Nor one I would particularly care to recommend to anybody else. Well, at least I stayed awake through it, which can’t be said for everybody in the theater …