Most of the time during the movie I found myself thinking things like "Wow, look at that." or "What the hell is that?" I spent very little time concerned with the fates of the various characters.
Vincent D'Onofrio plays a serial killer with a particularly odd fetish. He likes to put his victims in a big glass cage and let it fill up with water, slowly drowning them. Then he dips them in bleach to make them look like dolls. Then, just for kicks he hangs himself by numerous hooks in his back, arms and legs over the body and grimaces. One of my all time favorite movies is Silence of the Lambs, but I would almost wish it hadn't been made rather than have countless movies rip it off. D'Onofrio's killer is just another variation on the Buffalo Bill theme.
To propel the story forward, he suffers some sort of brains seizure just as the FBI closes in on him. This means that his latest victim is in the water tank, but they don't know where that is. The FBI brings him to Lopez, hoping she can enter his mind and find out where the victim is being held.
Lopez was here to be the person reacting to the horrors of the mind of a killer. She does that just fine but never really seems to develop a character. It felt like she was playing a nanny instead of a therapist. There was no edge to her at all. Her approach to dealing with a patient was to just coo to them. Yeah, that's going to settle down a serial killer.
The other main is Vince Vaughn's FBI agent. Vaughn is usually a talented and entertaining actor. Here he seemed bored out of his mind. In a scene where he describes his very emotional reasons for joining the FBI, he sounds about as interested as if he was describing how he cleans his toilet instead.
The movie just never found an emotional center to match its high flying visuals. Actually, as cool as the effects were, there wasn't always any real point to them. I got the feeling the special effects guys kept tossing in things that they were testing out but hadn't found a good use for yet. I can't help but compare it to Hollow Man. Both movies looked great but stumbled badly in the storytelling. With Hollow Man, I knew the fault lay in the script. With this one I suspect the director, Tarsem Singhe, wasn't quite ready for this.
If you love a movie that looks great and aren't terribly concerned with the plot, then by all means go see this one. If you're the sort of person who puts storytelling ahead of everything else then you probably want to skip this one.
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