Featured Review: MIRRORS

Mirrors



Starring- Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck, John Shrapnel



Directed by Alexandre Aja



Grade: F




"Don't make me threaten you!"

Remember that lost season of 24 when Jack Bauer, between thwarting Russian terrorists and a secret government conspiracy unit, saved the world from demonic spirits that use mirrors to kill innocents? The one where he runs around screaming at people to save his family, shooting at the mirrors, and then fights the secret bad guy that almost comes out of nowhere towards the end? And we thought the writer's strike would save us from such a wild scenario.

As ludicrious as the plot sounds, movies like Mirrors can at times be unabashedly good. Films like The Shining and Poltergeist knew how to effectively deal with troublesome and killer ghosts in a story that didn't hinder the excitement or terror. But while director Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes) earns a few points for cinematic style, he couldn't maintain a cohesive script, a shred of plausible acting, or any proper special effects. The rest of Mirrors is a jagged mess of broken shrapnel painstakingly piercing our auditory and visual senses.

Kiefer Sutherland stars as Ben Carson, a disgraced ex-cop who is rebounding from a bout with the bottle. His relationships are tenuous; he's unresponsive to his sister Angela (Amy Smart), seperated from his wife Amy (Paula Patton), and rarely sees his kids. That all is put to the test when Ben gets a job as a security guard, patrolling a burnt out department store that is left standing due to legal tie-ups. See, the mirrors in the place, enough to basically cover the entire store, are haunted with demon spirits. They want something, someone, Kiefer's blood be damned.

Never mind that the department store Kiefer oversees is larger than most malls, and that despite being gutted by a fire five years before, still retains all the charred mannequins, counters, and racks of burnt clothes. Never mind that Kiefer's job is so fresh that he's able to find the wallet of the guy he replaced in a locker, or that he can waltz in and check the guy's body because his wife just HAPPENS to be a forensic analyst at the morgue where the body was taken. No, Mirrors is much worse than that.

The plot holes are mind-numbingly rampant for a plot that sounds so ridiculous to begin with. Most of the damage the demon spirits inflict on the cast happen outside of the department store, as a means of revenge or notice. How can these random mirrors be haunted if the story's big reveal is primarily focused on the history of the department store mirrors? If they can travel to other mirrors in people's houses that easily, why don't they do much more widespread damage?

It's just another in a long line of films that only uses enough logic to drive its story, especially coming from a director who made one of the ultimate cop-out endings in recent film history in Haute Tension. They paint over the mirrors in the family house (and there's dozens of them. What, the Carsons don't appreciate any art?), instead of throwing them away, and apparently if that doesn't work, the spirits can supposedly control the water faucets, so they can reflect themselves in the flood.

The ending is somewhat unique, but the stupidity and fallacies of the first 108 minutes that preceded it completely desensitizes the viewer past the point of caring. It was like Aja came up with this last idea first, and attempted to build a shoddy story that leads to it.

Sutherland's status as Jack Bauer is supposed to lend an air of credence to the film, but Kiefer is overtly terrible. He starts off somewhat of a pussycat in his faux cashmere sweater and collared shirt, but by the end becomes as pushy and loud as Bauer is during an interrogation. Except instead of questioning terrorists, he's threatening elderly nuns about ghosts inside mirrors. Sutherland gets one-liner gold such as "What do you want from me?!" and "The mirrors... they're so clean!", and has an asinine penchant for screaming a singular profanity after every conversation. It's really quite humorous.

The effects were mostly cut-rate as well. The computer animation is so cartoonish in its gore factor that it illicited more laughter from the audience than gasps. Simple prosthetics, like in the mirror scene from Poltergeist, might have been scarier. Natch, just about anything inserted into the film would have been scarier than Mirrors as it is, aside from say, Prom Night.

Maybe I'm just being overly critical about a film that is not supposed to be as smart and sensible as Hamlet or even Hamlet 2. But you'd like to think that Kiefer and Patton are brighter than this. Even Amy Smart, she of Road Trip and Crank, doesn't deserve the miserable fate of being in Mirrors. When a horror film can't sustain a scare or even a modicum of reason for us to believe and invest in the story, the empathy for its mistakes doesn't exist. If only the wretched memory of Mirrors that now haunt my head didn't exist...