Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall | Who’s got the gravelliest voice of them all? Kiefer Sutherland looks for answers in Mirrors.
MIRRORS
Directed by Alexandre Aja. Starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart. Now playing.
**
Man has long been terrified of his own reflection, especially Kiefer Sutherland. Until now, no one has dared explore this primordial fear on film — not in the U.S. anyway. But now arriving in our midst is Mirrors, Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur’s remake of the 2003 Korean film Geoul sokeuru (Into the Mirror), starring the aforementioned scion of a prominent Canadian acting/healthcare-inventing family.
Writer/director Aja and writer/art director Levasseur are the team behind such gorefests as Haute Tension and the recent rehash of The Hills Have Eyes. The former film at least gave the sleazy cinephile reason to hope that they might take up the reins of icons of European horror like Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci, but the boys up and moved their operation west and starting churning out remakes (like the forthcoming Piranha 3-D).
If Mirrors makes any money during its opening weekend, the person who deserves the most credit isn’t Aja or Levasseur, but whoever edited the TV spots. A glimpse of Amy Smart lying in the tub prying her own head open, a hint of gobbledygook about murderous spirits living in mirrors and not the merest whiff of a “plot” — I expected the film to consist of nothing but one skin-crawling shock after another. Alas, the faint-hearted need not worry.
Sutherland plays one of the movie’s world’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of down-at-heel ex-cops who’s trying to rally back from a stroke of bad luck that turned him into an alcoholic and almost cost him his hot wife (Paula Patton) and adorable kids (Cameron Boyce and Erica Gluck). He takes a job as a security guard in the remains of a fire-ravaged high-end department store which, the friendly old guy in charge of backstory informs us, used to be a hospital in the ’50s. And guess what? There are lots of mirrors in there, tended to a spotless shine by Sutherland’s predecessor — you know, the one who disappeared ...
The story unfolds from there with all the logic and coherence we’ve come to expect from remakes of Asian horror movies.
It’s a good thing that Aja and Levasseur are good at the visceral shocks, because Mirrors follows up an intensely gruesome opening and some preliminary cheap jolts with a story so slackly paced that the crinkles around Kiefer’s eyes can pretty much carry it all by themselves. Once he figures out what he has to do to protect his family from whatever threat it is shiny surfaces present and starts running around trying to put a stop to their reflective rampage, it doesn’t feel like there’s much to be tense about anymore, except that you never know when Aja and splattery effects guy Greg Nicotero will subject you to something else really gross on their way to the noisy but anticlimactic climax.
It takes close to two hours for Mirrors to get to the bottom of its great and terrible mysteries. It used to be that horror movies knew how to arrive at their thinly conceived “twist” endings in under 90 minutes, but Aja unwisely provides you with plenty of time to notice that his narrative is becoming sillier and sillier.
But if the TV ads still have your interest in Mirrors piqued, try and resist for just a little while longer; you’ll surely have to wait no more than a couple of months for it to come out on DVD, with bonus bloody scenes.
