The Cell
Brilliant. Falls a bit short in terms of plot, it just ends abruptly, but more than makes up for it everywhere else. It’s like a human mind: precious but fragile, breaks down if mistreated, or over analysed.
Our protagonist is a very calm and soft spoken JLo, she feels like an angel speaking so softly, almost a whisper. She tries to raise a kid from a deep coma by using the Paprika machine, I mean, the Inception contraption. It’s the Lotus Eater Machine, she can travel into minds.
To keep it safe, she only travels to the kid’s mind, a vast desert with a salt flat in the middle, filled with dead trees. She fails in the treatment, again, for the umpteenth time. The kid is simply taken by a malevolent force that keeps him unable to will himself awake.
This seems like an exclusive clinic, very much experimental, but the kid’s father hates this kind of new age woo and wants him off the program. He recants after talking with the money men.
But suddenly, gears are shifted. A serial killed just kidnapped his eight victim, trapped her in an automated torture drowning device, and fell into a coma. Only our protagonist can visit his mind for the location of the poor woman.
What a twisted mind. She manages to find his child ego, a tormented child who just wants to be loved, but she has to cross over crazy environments: Escherian stairwells (a lightweight Cube), a sort of Victorian Bedlam hospice (a lightweight Saw), and a horse being sliced like that exhibition of human bodies. But the worse happens: after such torments, she is trapped in his mind, unable to tell reality from imagination.
Fret not, because the FBI dude who wants to tap that ass will rescue her. He foolishly talked to a psychiatrist, so she knows he’s the perfect foil to the villain: a kid that was abused as a child and turned out a upstanding member of society. Nobody ever says it, but everybody knows.
In the dream, he prances about in crazy town, and eventually finds a clue he should have remembered before, an eureka moment where he call another guy to check something for him. Kinda underwhelming, but the girl is located. If it works, it works.
Meanwhile, in her mind, she ravishes the evil mind, but that also leads to death of the innocent child. He finally achieves peace, which is probably permanent coma. An unfair trade for her, killing a boy.
The cast is enormous, all side characters are bona fide character actors. Some are almost cameos, one scene wonders. There’s the Martian mutant with the vagina face from Total Recall, the priest from Constantine, the chief from the RoboCop.
But the main cast steal the goddamn show. JLo has a soothing voice, always, and both Vince Vaugh and Vincent D’Onofrio are just great (was that on purpose, the same name?). D’Onofrio has done so much shit, he’s an household name, but the other dude from crappy Adam Sandler films? How was he an hipster actor? Between this and Psycho, maybe he had enough darkness.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.