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Jennifer Lopez is the queen of romantic comedies and Vince Vaughn is the king of college-aimed comedies. So when I rented The Cell, I immediately wondered why these two royalties are in a movie together. And why is the movie a thriller with tinges of horror? And why is the movie actually… good?

You never know where life will take you, and The Cell, out of all movies, was the turning point in these two actors' careers. I like Lopez and Vaughn, and seeing them act together in The Cell is a funny sight to behold, in a nostalgic way. When the film was released in August of 2000, Jennifer Lopez was still a respectable actress, coming hot off of the critically raved George Clooney-starrer Out of Sight, audience-adored Anaconda, and accolade-accumulating Selena. Vince Vaughn was forging a career for himself by making serious dramas, although they were seldom seen.

With that in mind, casting them in a movie together at the time made sense, and it proved to be the recipe for box office success.

Marketed as a film in the vein of The Silence of the Lambs with a technological and stylized-edge, the problem with The Cell is that it is really three movies.

The first movie is my favorite element and the one starring Lopez. She quietly plays social worker turned child psychologist Catherine Deane; one of the foremost experts in an experimental virtual reality system that allows her to enter the minds of comatose patients to coax them back to consciousness.

Vaughn leads the second film that plays parallel. He howls as the pressured FBI Agent Novak, who is hunting a serial killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio), who drowns his victims and then shapes their corpses to look like dolls.

The two plotlines combine to make a third film, when Novak captures the killer who has slipped into a coma, enlisting Catherine’s help to enter his mind and find the location of his latest victim.

Each story alone can make a full-length feature that would be more than satisfying. Together they give us an underdeveloped saga that reaches a conclusion, yet rarely does more than scratch the surface of emotion and thought-provocation. I hate seeing wasted potential, and this movie spews it. While this doesn’t mean that The Cell is bad, I feel as if it could have been much more than a typical adult thriller with a generic title.

If you are looking forward to seeing trippy, twisted visuals, you’ll have to sit through about 40 minutes of prologue first. Yet, even with the longer-than-needed set-up, the character development is little more than a few traits.

Deane’s character history is slowly revealed throughout the process of the movie, and debut director Tarsem Singh manages to get just enough details in so that we care about her survival. Agent Novak, on the other hand, is less of a character and more of a silhouette. The shallow grave the killer ditches his victims in has more depth than the serious yet friendly Novak, who is a broad FBI stereotype.

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