Moriarty's Been To THE CELL, And Lived To Tell!!

Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some rumblings from the Lab.

I was going to refrain. I was going to just be quiet and let the sheeple have their weekend to wallow in filth and stupidity. I promised myself. I said, "Yes, self, this is one you should sit out. You hated the screenplay. You have a well-documented aversion to empty eye candy. Just let it be." But after joining Gregor Samsa, John Robie (back from a fairly major heist he just pulled in Monaco), and Harry Lime for an afternoon screening of THE CELL at the lovely Vista theater in Hollywood, I have no choice.

New Line? Shame on you.

Roger Ebert? Double plus extra shame on you.

I have seen many Evil things in my time. George Lucas and his necksack. Bette Midler films. LA cops working "crowd control." But nothing in my arsenal could prepare me for the sheer mind-numbing detestability of the screen debut of music video hack/alien life form Tarzan. I think he works under the one name because he's afraid if he gives his last name out, someone who sat through this abortion might look him up in the phone book, drive to his house, and stomp him like a narc at a biker rally. He certainly deserves it.

We are entering the intense, noisy part of the 2000 Presidential race, and one of the issues that both sides are evidently going to hammer mercilessly is the idea of stronger regulation of Hollywood and marketing. It scares the hell out of me that even the liberals are calling for greater accountability, enforced responsibility. You want to know why it's going to happen? Because of irresponsible, ill-conceived shit like this, that's why. Wanna know something else? In a case like this, they're right.

And, no, I'm not talking about censorship. At least, not external censorship. I'm talking about internal regulation. I'm talking about actually thinking about what the hell we're putting out into the marketplace as a community. Make no mistake... THE CELL has no moral leg to stand on. It is a woefully ignorant movie, full of imagery that exists for no other reason that to titillate and be "cool." Tarzan brings every trick he knows (which actually turns out to be a fairly small number) to the table in his effort to disguise the hollow core of this film, but it doesn't work. What we've got here is a thriller with no thrills, a horror film with no scares, that seems to believe that death is pretty, that murder is a rock video tableau, and that the psychology of serial killers, a subject that qualified professionals spend their whole lives trying to understand, basically boils down to good little kids who do bad things 'cause they just need hugs.

It's hard to know where to begin to discuss this picture and the myriad ways in which it's wrong. I guess let's get the obvious out of the way. Every critic I've read trying to justify this festering bag of vomit falls back on comparisons to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and SE7EN. Even a cursory comparison of this film to those reveals just how significant the flaws here are, though. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS manages to deal with the seductive cat and mouse game between a killer and an FBI agent in a much more powerful way because the mind games played are verbal, truly psychological. When Lecter gets into the mind of Starling, he does real damage with what he finds there, and it's not just random imagery stolen from paintings, either. Ted Tally's adaptation of Thomas Harris' novel gets to the real, beating heart of a person like Starling, and they aren't afraid to hurt her, to make it count. At the end of that film, Demme's cutting of the final suspense set piece is masterful. There's a great fake-out involving the other FBI agents that floored audiences, and Starling manages to face down a monster on her own in a sequence that is still iconic, still imitated. With SE7EN, there was a disturbing beauty to the way Fincher and Khondji shot the tableaus of death that were the centerpieces of the film, but there was also moral heft to them. There was pain and sadness and a loss of life felt. And, again, there's an ending on that film which lifts it out of being any mere genre film and turns it into a meditation on the struggle between that which is right and that which is wrong, a struggle that it feels like we are losing on days like today.

Make no mistake... I am horrified by the jackals I have heard smacking their lips over this film. "It looks cool" is what each conversation seems to boil down to. That's normally an excuse I find rather weak when discussing the merits of a film, but in this case, it's inexcusable. Just making something look cool does not justify putting it on a screen, not when there are such profoundly amoral intentions at work. And, yes, I know that we live in a cynical age, and we've all been hardened by overexposure to certain images, and I know that I play up the whole Evil shtick here on the page, but I do believe that there are things we have to answer for as a culture, and the idea that we derive entertainment from "stepping inside the mind of a serial killer" leads us down some very dark and unhappy paths. There's no answers offered here beyond the pat and the obvious. Carl Stargher is beaten by an abusive father and he's called "faggot," so of course he grows up to kidnap, torture, and murder women before masturbating into their dead bodies. Of course. It all makes so much sense.

If we start to pull at the flimsy construct that passes for a script here, the whole thing unravels quickly... so let's, shall we? Where do we start? Do we discuss the non-attempt at justifying their pseudo-science? Do we discuss how Stargher's methodology has nothing whatsoever to do with the life we see in his flashbacks? Do we discuss the fact that Jennifer Lopez would be indicted for murder at the end of this film and the program would be dismantled because of the way she resolves the Stargher storyline? Or do we just sit back and accept the "mercy killing" we witness because she shore does look purty in her fuck-me pumps when she shows up at the end to talk to Vince Vaughn?

Or should we discuss performances? Lopez seems to be taking speech lessons from Melanie Griffith, her "shmoopy woopy" baby talk voice seeming worse here than ever before. Vaughn has officially turned into Dean Martin, lurching drunkenly through this film like he's got a party to get to. He might as well have his tie undone, a drink in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. It's a ludicrous performance, and his big scene where he hints at a history of abuse in his own past is offensive because it's thrown away, dropped in just to add another level of skank to an already overwhelmingly skanky experience. And then there's D'Onofrio. Oh, how the talented can fall. There are moments in his work here that would be laugh-out-loud funny if they weren't so jaw-droppingly pretentious. I actually don't know who to hate more between him and Lopez. At least D'Onofrio can argue that he did what he was hired to. Lopez actually saved this script from development hell and pushed it into production through sheer force of will. What was she thinking? "Oh, I'll look fabulous," evidently, since that's all the film's about. She drifts through in a haze, in one bizarre outfit after another, never connecting with another actor, never even suggesting something that resembles a recognizable human emotion.

I haven't even gotten into the way Tarzan consistently wastes great character actors like Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Dylan Baker, and Pruitt Taylor Vince in roles that could have been played by cardboard cutouts. In recent interviews, Tarzan has talked about how he would prefer to recut THE CELL as a silent film, and his contempt for his actors and the script they're delivering is obvious in the perfunctory, detached way every single exchange of dialogue is shot. He is absolutely without any ability to make us feel something for the people we're watching, and empathy is the only thing that could have drawn me into a film this powerfully, willfully stupid. As a result of his disinterest, we never care about the girl who has been locked into Stargher's underground cell. We never care if she's found. Of course, this being a film that goes for only easy answers and obvious beats, the suspense is undercut by the fact that it's obvious she will be found and saved. It's a given, the absolute death of suspense.

In Roger Ebert's four-star (!!!) review for this film, he references 2001, and he's not the first person I've heard do so. I repeat... shame on you. Kubrick's film was a bracing vision of the way mankind has evolved, the way we struggle with our own base instincts, the way we reach for the heavens, our ambition sometimes exceeding our reach, and the way we will take the step from this stage of evolution to whatever wonders await us next. It is a film about hope and it is a film that encompasses the entire human experience. How dare you compare this empty, sadistic anti-thrill ride to that masterwork? How dare you bring up this perfume commercial for murder, this ode to sickness, and imply that imagery left over from a Nine Inch Nails video somehow puts Tarzan in the same class as Kubrick, or even the other directors you reference like Fincher and PT Anderson and Spike Jonze? Hell, Spike Jonze outdoes THE CELL in one sequence in last year's bracing and brilliant BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. There's that great sequence near the end of the movie where Cameron Diaz chases Catherine Keener through the landscape of Malkovich's subconscious. It's a trip, but it's also sharp, funny, smart stuff that illuminates the way we all keep private corners in our mind, places no one else should visit. In five minutes, Jonze says everything THE CELL seems to be groping about for, and he does it without falling back on imagery from his past music videos, and without using cheap gore effects and silly CGI imagery.

I mean... I'm stumped. "Visionary"?! Last year, when I reviewed FIGHT CLUB on this page, Roger actually wrote me a simple e-mail in which he said, "Moriarty, you fell for it. FIGHT CLUB is a macho wheezy porn trick. RE" That was it. He dismissed a film of exceptional moral complexity because he couldn't see beyond the black humor and the visceral impact of the imagery, and then he turns around and embraces this... filth... because it's pretty. It's disconcerting for me, because I grew up like many of you did, watching Roger on TV, amazed by the passion that he and Gene brought to their discussions of film each week. Now it seems that he's rejecting the challenging and embracing the simple in a way that is distressing. When a movie like this opens with "TWO THUMBS UP!!" across the top of the ad, he's managed to put it on the map, open it up to debate. People will go this weekend, and they will have to carry this around with them as a result. They walk away with nothing new added to the general noise of the serial killer genre aside from a certain way of presenting the sadism on camera. When Carl Stargher begins to chatter happily as he pulls out Vince Vaughn's intestines while dressed like Gary Oldman in DRACULA, I had no other response than to collapse into helpless laughter. It was that or throw my drink at the screen. The train has hopped the tracks by this point, and there's nothing Tarzan could do to salvage it. It's not like he cares or even understands, though. To him, it's not about making sense. It's about the image. There are countless shots in this film that simply exist as a sort of desperate "Aren't I clever?!" cry to the cheap seats. Helicopters land in slow-motion as heat patterns ripple the screen. We're treated to a Wikki Wachee snuff show at one point. Clues are hammered home with all the subtlety of a fart in church.

And then there's that plot hole. Oh, I know... there's at least one metric assload of plot holes in the film, but there's one in particular that renders discussion of all the others moot. The second time Lopez is dropped into Stargher's dreams, there's a glitch. She thinks she's still in the lab, and she gets up to go flip a circuit breaker. That's when she realizes that she's actually already in Stargher's dreams, where he has somehow perfectly reproduced a room that he has never seen, that he has only occupied while in a coma, eyes closed. It's such a profoundly bone-headed move, so easy to catch and correct that it should have been done at the first production meeting, that I gave up. Any interest I had in cutting anyone involved any slack whatsoever simply evaporated.

THE CELL is not a dangerous film. It's not smart enough to be dangerous. But it's dangerous filmmaking, and that's because of the reckless abandon with which Tarzan approaches the film. He justifies all the attacks on Hollywood. I think it's ironic that films like NATURAL BORN KILLERS and FIGHT CLUB are mentioned as being irresponsible, when both of them contain more genuine emotional and moral complexity in any ten minutes than this film does in its whole running time. They're films about something, films that strive to find hope amidst the darkness, that ache to make sense of a world that sometimes doesn't. They are ultimately responsible because of the intelligence behind them. THE CELL is a film that feels like it was made by a robot, programmed only to ape old paintings and try to reproduce them with actors inserted. It is empty, it is ugly, and it is a complete failure of the studio system on every level. All I could think while watching the climax is that I could use a shower as forceful as the one administered in Stargher's cell to wash away the slimy film left behind by such a shallow, insipid experience. I am truly sorry I gave up my time, my money, and my brain cells to this one, and I will not forget the trangression. Tarzan, you and I ain't friends. And if you are one of the hollow men who finds enjoyment or kicks in this film, then you and I ain't friends either.

"Moriarty" out.