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| Mirrors |
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  (2/10)
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Runtime: 110 |
| Public Rating: 8.29 (17 votes) |
Director: Alexandre Aja |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: action, thriller, horror |
Year: 2008 |
| Writer(s): Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur |
| Distributor: # Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation |
| Reviewed by: LaRae Meadows |
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Mirrors is about a security guard looking at what’s evil in the mirrors. Mirrors is a reflection of the director, writers and actors and they’d be smart to steer clear of the looking-glass until the original celluloid for this film is destroyed.
Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) lands a job at the nearly destroyed Mayflower Department store as the night security guard after being removed from the police force because of a shooting gone wrong. His wife Amy Carson (Paula Patton) had kicked him out of the house after the shooting because he was suffering from a slight mental breakdown. His new job did nothing to help his mental health situation when he realizes there is something in the mirror. The reflections are showing him things that weren’t really there, something evil. It gets worse when he realizes anything reflective is dangerous.
When I left the theater I worried that I was suffering from Rosacea. I realized it wasn’t the skin rash nicknamed Slap-Face, I actually had slapped my forehead enough through Mirrors that my face was red. Every three or four minutes, the writing would be so terrible, so abhorrent, so typical, so ridiculous, so idiotic that it activated hand to forehead. Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the “writers” of Mirrors, tried too hard to use the love a father has for his children, the love for a wife, the guilt of the shooting, and the mental breakdown, but can’t quite pull off the emotional resonance necessary to make the case for Ben Carson’s emotional state. Aja and Levasseur couldn’t even give the intellectual credit due to a doctor (Amy) and a detective (Ben) by writing them as moronic dumbasses who can’t make one good decision to protect themselves or their family. They even threw in some good old fashioned Catholic mysticism to round out the abysmal script.
It wasn’t entirely the writers’ fault. Keiffer Sutherland might as well have been acting in an elementary school play. He is supposed to be wildly unstable and unpredictable, but he just comes across as a guy trying to seem unstable and unpredictable. He can’t make the transitions to angry from tender naturally enough to wrap the audience in his instability.
In an attempt to make Keiffer Sutherland seem like less of a mess they cast Paula Patton to lower the quality further, making Sutherland look better in Mirrors. Getting an emotion out of Patton would be as difficult as squeezing a pineapple through a toothpaste tube. Her portrayal of a wife watching her husband unravel and a mother worried about her children are exactly the same, blank. Sure, she attempts to eke out a tear here and there and the script doesn’t offer many opportunities to shine, but she wouldn’t even be cast in an elementary school play.
The cinematography seems to be of the same quality of a parent filming their primary schooler’s first attempt at acting. Grainy, out of focus, bad framing and seconds of nothing in frame make Mirrors a visual abomination. Maxime Alexandre, the “cinematographer” of Mirrors, should consider going into filming local television commercials or births for a local hospital.
Director and writer Alexandre Aja is another shining example of why the writer and the director should usually not be the same person. With no creative oversight or direction from a clean set of eyes, Aja is completely unable to see outside his own vision, amateur and pedestrian as it was. He, Sutherland, Patton, Levasseur, and Alexandre should be sentenced to watching a group of sane people watch Mirrors through a two way mirror. Hopefully their emotional damage will rival the pain everyone who watched this movie felt.
If this had been a TV movie, it might have been a little more fun but it is not worth seeing in the theater, it is not worth renting and if it came on TV, I’d read a book. I’m off to ice my forehead.
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