Mirrors

(2008)***

Ex-cop Ben is down on his luck. His wife recently kicked him to the curb, he lost his job, and he’s struggling to maintain sobriety. Fortunately he was able to obtain a new job as a night watchman - unfortunately this job is located in the scariest possible setting, an old, burned out department store that was a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. The day watchman informs Ben that the owners have no intention to renovate but do not wish to demolish the old building either. Oh yeah, and the last night watchman died under mysterious circumstances. Most of the job entails sitting in a crappy little camper on the grounds of the department store. Every 2 hours Ben is expected to make his rounds. Oh yeah, the place has no electricity. Initially the job seems pretty simple and his rounds are fairly uneventful. Oh yeah, the place is full of more large mirrors than a carnival funhouse. However soon weird things start to occur, such as permanent handprints appearing on some of the mirrors, and startling imagery that exist only in the mirrors (e.g., a person on fire standing next to Ben, etc). Like anyone who enters the house in JU-ON, Ben unintentionally takes his work home with him and weird things begin to occur in his own mirrors. Like every J-horror film in the past decade there is a mystery to be solved and time is running out.

Admittedly I was pretty jaded when I decided to check out Mirrors because it already had two strikes against it; (1) it’s a loose remake of a Korean film called Into the Mirror and we all know that America has a pretty poor track record when it comes to remaking J-horror; and (2) It’s an American horror film and we all know that America has a pretty poor track record when it comes to making scary horror movies. However, I reasoned, the film takes place in a big abandoned hospital replete with mirrors, which are encouraging ingredients for some good scares. I would love to report that I was wrong, but sadly I was on the money.

The first half of the film is actually pretty entertaining, largely due to the fantastic creepy abandoned hospital-turned-department store setting, but the second half, where most of the budget was no doubt spent, is full of large explosions, floods, and an unnecessary cacophony of music and screeching. The story is marginally entertaining and there are one or two mild scares and a few gruesome deaths, but overall Mirrors is just checklist horror filmmaking.

On another note, I’ve never seen an episode of 24 so I was shocked to see how weathered and tired Kiefer Sutherland looks these days, and what’s with his voice? He sounds like Bale’s Batman when he speaks, growling through his lines like a lifelong smoker with laryngitis. Why does he always play a recovering alcoholic?

The last minute of the film offers a pretty cool twist that forces me to give this film an extra half-star.