Genuinely, when I first got a hold of this one, I wasn’t even all that sure why it existed in the first place.  No one ever accused the original Cell of being a blockbuster hit, or an Academy Award contender, or even, you know, good.  So it’s hard to believe that this merited a sequel, but then, considering that Wrong Turn will have a second sequel before much longer, and even Urban Legend could rate two, I guess it’s just part of that grand movement to get what you can get.

The Cell 2 will bring us a thriller centered around, once again, The Cusp, a serial killer who brings his victims back to life after each kill so he can kill them again and again before finally, actually, killing them.  One of his last victims, Maya, received special powers as a result of her time with The Cusp, which she only just barely survived.  I’m not kidding about the special powers–they have a whole explanation readied about how the repeated death cycles release a flood of specialized hormones into the brain and activate normally dormant parts.  Anyway, Maya’s going to turn around and use her newfound special powers to regularly enter the memories and, occasionally, the conscious mind of the missing victims and the killer in a bid to locate them and bring The Cusp to justice.

Naturally, none of the trippy visual imagery of the last one will be in this one.  And Jennifer Lopez, the only recognizable name of the last one will be replaced with a bunch of no-names that I really don’t recognize.  In fact, this bears about as much resemblance to the original as a pig resembles a tuna salad sandwich.

In fact, I have absolutely no clue why this even is The Cell 2.  The Cell was such a low-rent property to begin with that they weren’t going to get a whole lot of name recognition out of it, and this would’ve done about as well being called anything else.

See, this movie, unlike The Cell, is not so bad.  The Cell sacrificed story coherence for trippy visual imagery, whereas The Cell 2 will cut way back on the trippy imagery, thus requiring them to have at least something resembling a coherent plot.  Granted, it will be heavily laden with cheese, poorly explained metaphysics, and stuff that isn’t even remotely possible, but it will at least make something like sense.

I say something like sense, of course, because the very nature of this kind of movie will preclude a LOT of it from making sense.  They’re going to do a whole lot of stuff here that they’re not even going to REMOTELY bother trying to explain.  It’s a lot like living in a world in which people occasionally cough up vital organs and stuff them calmly back in their mouths; that is, the thoroughly inexplicable will happen on a regular basis without explanation or preamble.

When compared to the original installment of The Cell, The Cell 2 actually manages to come off pretty well.  But considering that the original installment of The Cell was perpetrated as some kind of practical joke against moviegoing audiences that’s still not saying much.