'Cube,' one predictably dull film

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

The low-budget Canadian horror film "Cube" so frequently pays tribute to or, more aptly, borrows heavily from the work of Alfred Hitchcock, George A. Romero and Wes Craven that it's astonishing how little it benefits from the wit, tension and style of the best work of those established masters of suspense. Rather, director Vincenzo Natali's feature debut serves primarily as another one of the genre's tired formulas, as an assorted group of total strangers find themselves in a strange location where their lives are being threatened.
To add a bit of novelty this time around, Natali and his co-screenwriters Andre Bijelic and Graeme Manson place our intrepid assortment of everymen (and women, of course) inside of a large cubical structure that apparently has no precise reason for being. One cube-shaped room leads to six possible others which, in a clever method of using the same set for the entire film, all look identical and all lead to another six rooms. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that only one of the possible rooms is safe to enter, while the other five bear deadly booby traps activated by motion or voice.
As for the film's protagonists, the diverse bunch consists of a black cop, a white psychologist, an autistic mental patient, a teenage math whiz and a brooding, mysterious architect. It's straight out of any one of Romero's zombie movies and, to make matters even more convenient, each character possesses a special skill that he or she may not even be aware of, but which can help in their quest to find a way out of the cube.
So, with much predictability, "Cube" meanders along as the band of six travels from room to room throughout the cube, with tensions mounting every step of the way. That all the characters soon end up at each others' throats, with one of them going completely berserk, should come as no surprise. That there's utterly no suspense or rising drama to any of this might seem a bit more unusual, until you consider that "Cube" functions, more or less, along exactly the same line as a disaster movie and that, as such, the characters are merely stock creations subordinate to some impending, high-concept event.
Except in "Cube," there is no disaster to await, unless you count the movie itself (and, in particular, its ridiculous final moments). Most of the time, Natali is instead satisfied to let his characters ramble on in pretentious and sanctimonious diatribes against government spending and the military industrial complex without them ever running the risk of sounding like they know what they're talking about. As a horror-disaster film desperately trying to rekindle the social satire of films like "Dawn of the Dead," "Cube" is an even greater failure than it would be as just a token horror-disaster movie.
Maddeningly little transpires in "Cube" over the course of a very seemingly long 92 minutes and, try though he might, Natali can elicit nothing but the most hysterical, overly emphatic performances from his amateur cast. All the performers (not one of whom even deserves to be singled out) scream and shout their lines with reckless abandon, eliciting some of the most unintentional guffawing this side of a student film.
Never one to knock on cheap horror films, I'm actually quite a big fan of movies like Craven's "Last House on the Left" and Stephen Hopkins' "Dangerous Game" that seem most directly responsible for the mood and tone of "Cube." Even the general premise of "Cube" is not without potential and the filmmakers definitely score a few points for creative production design, but the film as a whole is dead in the water from the get-go and a major missed opportunity. Natali never really wants to get inside of his characters' heads, but he doesn't seem to want to do much else either.
When the obligatory spurts of violence and gore do come, they are without genuine fright, while everything in between feels like one overly complex setup for an exceedingly facile resolution. The only genuine suspense in "Cube" comes late in the film's third act, as the histrionics and social commentary are temporarily cast aside and the characters finally pour all their attention into figuring out the puzzle of the cube. Of course, if that happened any earlier, there wouldn't be a movie here, and while "Cube" does manage for a few fleeting moments to snap you out of your daydream and rivet your attention, it soon falls back into a pattern of ludicrous exaggeration and the painful reminder that Natali does not know when or how to end his banal mind game.