Mirrors

Whenever I'm watching a movie with promise take a dive into straight-out silliness, my heart sinks a little. My heart was sinking a lot while watching Mirrors. It holds some interesting ideas behind its plot and some good atmosphere with its central setting (the burned remains of an upscale department store), but then wastes its time (and ours) with lots of cheap scares, even cheaper gore shots, a ludicrous climax, and an even worse final scene. It's almost as if co-writer and director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, 2006's The Hills Have Eyes) slowly lost all sense of reason himself the further the film went into production.

The idea behind Mirrors is that there is another world behind the glass, a much darker and more evil world, and what happens when this world can start affecting our own. Although it's not listed in the credits, this film is a remake of a Korean movie called Into the Mirror. I have not seen the original inspiration, so I cannot compare the two movies. All I can say is that this film takes so many wild turns into so many different directions, I started to ask myself where it was going to go next, and not in a good way. At least the movie is slow in getting to the silliness. Perhaps a bit too slow. Aja seemed to be trying to make a slow-burn paranormal thriller here, but there's only so many times we can see the lead hero stepping around in the dark with a flashlight, cautiously eyeing every mirror or piece of reflective glass he comes in contact with, before it starts to lose its effectiveness. There's not enough material here to fill Mirror's nearly two hour running time, and the end result is a needlessly pokey and ultimately contrived thriller that never quite thrills.

The plot: Kiefer Sutherland plays a former New York police detective named Ben Carson, who quit the force over a year ago after he accidentally shot a fellow officer. Ben hasn't been quite the same since, having problems with alcohol and popping pills, and it has taken its toll on his wife Amy (Paula Patton from the recent Swing Vote) and two young kids. As the film opens, he's living with his sister Angela (Amy Smart), and hoping that his new job will be a step toward rebuilding his life. He takes a job as the night watchman at the condemned Mayflower department store, a once-lavish shopping center that was ravished by a deadly fire five years ago. Ben is supposed to patrol the remains of the building every few hours, and as he does, he notices something strange about the mirrors in the store - they seem brand new and untouched by the flames. Even stranger, he keeps on seeing nightmarish visions of people screaming and in agony in their reflective surfaces. You'd think this would be enough to convince Ben to look into a different line of work, but he becomes obsessed, especially when the mirrors start delivering messages to him that appear in cracks in their surfaces. Of course, these messages consist of a vague clue, in this case a name - "Esseker". The ghosts obviously know the cliches of the movie they're in, which states that they can never come right out and say what they want.

As Ben races about the city, trying to find out who Esseker is and what the mirrors want with him, his family begins to find themselves in danger, as the ghosts can apparently move themselves to mirror surfaces outside of the store as well. This is not really explained very well. They apparently start attacking people close to their victim if he or she is taking too long to decipher their cryptic riddles. Don't the ghosts know they'd get what they want quicker if they were more helpful and not killing people? Basically, it's the movie painting itself into a corner by changing the rules. If the ghosts can appear in any reflective surface they want outside of the store, why are they picking on the night watchman? Why not someone more important who would have access to the information they want, or someone who's close to this Esseker person? It's hard to get wrapped up in a supernatural thriller when you keep on finding logic holes in the ghosts' plan. It's also hard when the director apparently gave orders to Kiefer Sutherland to ham up his performance as much as possible. I don't think there's a scene in this movie where he's not frenzied, screaming, or a combination of both.

Mirrors takes itself way too seriously. It doesn't even have fun with itself when Ben starts trying to protect his wife and kids by covering all their mirrors with paint and putting newspapers up over their windows. What would the neighbors think? I kept on waiting for a scene where one would show up, and he'd have to try to explain to them what he was doing. This never happens, as Ben just keeps on racing around, trying to find Esseker. I won't reveal what he finds, but I will say that it's at this point that the movie goes from being an underwhelming ghost movie and becomes an even more underwhelming rip off of The Exorcist. The film's climax (which is clumsily shot with rapid edits, so we can hardly tell what's going on) made me feel like I was watching a Celebrity Wrestling match between Kiefer Sutherland and Linda Blair. Now there's a movie! Forget the possessed mirrors and spooky visions, and just give us that fight. Even after all this, the movie still has enough time to throw an uninspired twist ending at us, which would probably be right at home in a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone.

I started out intrigued by Mirrors. I liked the production design of the charred department store, and a few of the early jump scares were cheap but effective. But then the movie keeps on relying on the same tricks over and over, and I grew impatient as the plot unraveled itself much slower than necessary. It's almost as if the screenplay is killing time, instead of actually exploring its own ideas. Alexandre Aja is a filmmaker who is known for fast paced, gory horror. Here, he tries for something a bit more leisurely, but still gory. The problem is he forgets to engage us while he's taking his time. All this movie gives us is a lot of glass surfaces, a silly and contrived plot, and constant wondering of what this movie could have been in the hands of someone who knew how to make this work.

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