An FBI agent (Vince Vaughn) persuades a social worker (Jennifer Lopez), who is adept with a new experimental technology, to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) in order to learn where he has hidden his latest kidnap victim.
The director, Tarsem Singh, presides over a movie whose raison d'être is a series of garish but arresting dream sequences, which make use of a wide variety of old and new cinematic techniques. Sickening images, both in and out of the dreams, make the movie unpleasant; while the heavy stamp of self-seriousness makes it occasionally silly. But I really liked Jennifer Lopez, who is touchingly sincere; and I liked the movie's relative lack of cynicism. The grotesquerie has a point. We're challenged to have compassion for a man we might expect to hate comfortably; but in order to play fair, the movie has to show us just how sick he is.
The director, Tarsem Singh, presides over a movie whose raison d'être is a series of garish but arresting dream sequences, which make use of a wide variety of old and new cinematic techniques. Sickening images, both in and out of the dreams, make the movie unpleasant; while the heavy stamp of self-seriousness makes it occasionally silly. But I really liked Jennifer Lopez, who is touchingly sincere; and I liked the movie's relative lack of cynicism. The grotesquerie has a point. We're challenged to have compassion for a man we might expect to hate comfortably; but in order to play fair, the movie has to show us just how sick he is.