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Movie Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)

Tarsem Singh‘s Mirror Mirror is a constant disappointment, a re-imagining of Snow White so droll and lifeless one wonders when a valiant prince will wander by to resuscitate the poor thing. Though it supposes itself a radical take on classic material, there is little—if anything—new going on here. The Queen is still evil. The princess is still beautiful. The prince, though oafish, is still charming. The two will mostly likely live happily ever after, the very picture of hetero-normative bliss.

Here, Snow White (Lily Collins) is the daughter of a King (Sean Bean). Her mother dies at birth, and her father re-marries. When he disappears, his second wife, Clementianna (Julia Roberts) becomes The Queen, using her royal appointment to drive up taxes and throw lavish parties. The kingdom, as one would expects, is in crippling financial peril, and The Queen must find a suitor who’ll provide her with a line of credit capable of maintaining her lifestyle. In wanders Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer), stripped to his underwear after a roadside encounter with a band of thieves. The Queen is immediately smitten and begins plotting to take him as a husband, but he is woefully infatuated with Snow White, who cut him down from the thieves’ trap. When White and Alcott dance at a ball the Queen throws to ensnare the Prince, it’s clear that the two were meant to be with each other.

Naturally, this enrages The Queen, who instructs her henchman (Nathan Lane) to take her to the woods, where she’ll be killed by a griffin-like creature who first appeared around the time The Queen took power. Despite Brighton’s slavish devotion to The Queen, he lets Snow White run away, where she takes up with the thieves—the seven dwarves. Together, they plan to return the Queen’s unfair taxes to the townspeople and restore Snow White to the throne, where she’ll presumably marry Prince Alcott and rule in peace. But The Queen, using the aid of her magic mirror, has Alcott under her spell, setting the stage for a royal wedding.

As cut-and-dry as it seems, Mirror Mirror is an absolute mess of plot elements, bits and baubles of fairy tale shtick stuck here and there to prop up an incredibly weak plot. The mirror, for example, seemingly exists as the story’s sole tangential connection to any previous version of Snow White; her ability to conjure love potions and send puppet assassins after Snow and the dwarves carrying a faint whiff of  deus ex machina. The dwarves, too, are superficially updated for our time, given names like Half-Pint, Butcher and Chuckles, saddled with the backstories to match. They take Snow White in, teach her how to fight, and are then locked in their own house when the time comes for them to fight. This is perhaps a better fate than the one that befalls Brighton, who is turned into a cockroach for not killing Snow in the forest. “A grasshopper had his way with me,” he complains to The Queen, preparing for her wedding.

As one expects from a Tarsem movie, Mirror Mirror is visually sumptuous. The castle’s architecture, the odd hut that houses the mirror, the dazzling array of dresses worn by both Roberts and Collins, all of these things look terrific, perhaps better encompassing the heightened, romantic reality of a fairytale than many films that’ve come before. Unfortunately, they’re put in the service of a film so benign that even its climactic role-reversal feels trite, a matter of focus group tested obligation. The action sequences, too, are listless, staged like lazy re-creations of the brawls from Shrek.

Roberts, at least, appears to be having fun, and she is Mirror Mirror‘s saving grace. Though not quite sympathetic—Tarsem reportedly wanted the audience to look upon a woman who’d poison a teenager with an apple as more human than monster—her vanity not only makes her more human than any other character in the film, but also provides for all of the film’s worthwhile scenes, among them a lavishly ridiculous spa-treatment involving bees, worms, and bird droppings. When the cartoon peril is finished, I’m left feeling like The Queen probably deserves Prince Alcott more than Snow White does. God knows she put more work into her pursuit.

Rating:

Mirror Mirror. Directed by Tarsem Singh. With Julia Roberts (The Queen), Lily Collins (Snow White), Armie Hammer (Prince Alcott), Nathan Lane (Brighton), and Sean Bean (King). Released March 30, 2012, by Relativity Media.

Movie Review: Season of the Witch (2011)

Season of the Witch, the latest in a series of Nic Cage projects that were, I assume, born from Cage’s inherent need to be in front of a camera (I guess technically Drive Angry was the latest, but I enjoyed that) is a film about nothing, even if it’d present itself to you as a film about Templars, plague, guilt and (and!) witches. That’s heavy stuff for what was clearly once a summer blockbuster hopeful, but fear not: Season of the Witch’s aspirations as serious business are cast aside the minute Nic Cage and Ron Pearlman, standing on a hill of sand before a sherbet-colored sky, begin cracking wise about going out for a few drinks after dispatching a few hundred Moors.

“I’m working up a powerful thirst,” Pearlman later says, bear-hugging a man roughly his size to death.

Later, having deserted the Templars after being forced to kill one (1) woman, ex-Templars Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Pearlman) discover that, while they were out, bubonic plague has ravaged the land. Felson seems disturbed by the boil-ridden dead bodies and, while riding with Behmen to Parts Unknown, opines on the fate of those pour souls, thusly:

“We’ve seen much death, you and I. But what does one do to deserve a death like that?”

“Nothing,” observes Behmen, stoically.

Then the camera swoops out from them, showing a town off in the distance.

“Finally,” Behmen says, as if completing his taxes. “A town.”

That sort of exchange happens quite often in Season of the Witch, a movie that knows all the old adventure movie clichés (rope bridges, spooky forests, steep mountain passes), but doesn’t have the slightest clue about what made those tropes reliable stand-bys. When the crew of men tasked with taking a supposed witch (Claire Foy)–which eventually includes a priest, a knight, a swindler, and a sword-able alter boy–overlook their route, marking the spooky forest (“Wormwood forrest. Not a place to be trifled with.”) and mountain pass, Felson and Behmen react like they’ve read this particular script hundreds of times, more “Not this again” than “Let’s be off, then!” Considering how old the ex-Templars are, that makes a certain bit of sense, but, really, what the hell else were they going to do with their time, sit in a dungeon and make comments about the smell?

You can probably guess what happens along the way. There are a few action scenes, a couple of people die, the girl in the cage that’s being wheeled across the countryside may or may not be a witch, etc. This movie’s cardinal sin, in my estimation, is that it blows nearly every opportunity it has to be entertaining. The Church’s position here is that the bubonic plague is being caused by this witch. The movie’s position is that the bubonic plague is not unlike whatever Hollywood-fashioned disease causes dead bodies to rise up and hunger for human flesh. It’s got a bunch of Templars, who were a pretty corrupt, devious bunch. Nic Cage, Ron Pearlman and Christopher Lee (in bubonic plague make-up) are along for the ride, and the early scenes where Cage and Pearlman sack and pillage Muslim stronghold after Muslim stronghold are shot against backdrops that are, at best, completely unreal. This could have been a movie about paranoia and fear and psychological stress and whatever illicit drugs Templars were doing–a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the medieval set–but instead the movie settles into its stilted dialog and eventually accepts shadow, fog and dirt as its color palate and, despite the best efforts of some low-budget CGI, decides to be a shallow, boring husk of a film.

I can’t say that I’ve exactly enjoyed director Dominic Sena’s previous movies, but at least in other genre schlock films he’s done, like Gone in 60 Seconds or Swordfish, he’s gotten his actors to perform with some degree of immediacy. The three men traveling with the Templars are here because the movie both needs to kill people who aren’t Cage and Pearlman, and because it needs survivors who aren’t them, either. They act as you might expect from cannon fodder. Ron Pearlman is as authentic as a wax figurine, Christopher Lee is criminally squandered, and Nic Cage seems like he’s always just woken up from the world’s worst nap. Not worthy of even so-bad-it’s-good aficionados, Season of the Witch is a 90-minute shrug of the shoulders. It’s bad, but at least it wasn’t Your Highness.

Rating:

Season of the Witch. Directed by Dominic Senna. With Nicolas Cage (Behmen), Ron Pearlman (Felson), Stephen Campbell Moore (Debelzaq), Claire Foy (The Girl) and Christopher Lee (Cardinal D’Ambroise). Released: January 7, 2011, by Relativity Media.

Movie Review: Stone (2010)

A parole officer finds himself a month or so from retirement. He’s got a clean record, a quiet home life, does everything by the book. Old school, some would call him. Beneath his button-up shirt and military haircut, however, there is a darkness. It’s buried, almost invisible to his peers, but there it is—a black abscess, an Achilles heel—on display before an arsonist looking for a little leverage, a way to get out of jail free. Stone, a grey, quiet, small movie about the parole officer’s darkness and the arsonist’s cunning, seems like the least likely film to feature a breakout performance, especially considering that the cop is Robert De Niro and the prisoner is Edward Norton, but Millla Jovovich, as the eponymous prisoner’s wife, breezes into the movie and steals the show.

In a lot of ways, this makes complete sense. Stone, regardless of its two leads, treads dangerously familiar ground for a psychological thriller. One man pits his brain against another man’s brain, searches him for any conceivable flaw, the list of possible flaws including old chestnuts like money, power, paranoia, women, or some shameful event in the mark’s past. Usually, the script double dips and gives the sucker two of these flaws—a guy who loves money loves to spend that money on women, usually women who aren’t the man’s wife. It’s possible to plug any two good actors into the role of con-man and mark and have an acceptable psychological thriller, and it just so happens that De Niro and Norton are both tremendous actors capable of bringing life to almost any script they read. The trick, however, is to have an interesting MacGuffin. If it’s a woman, as it is in Stone, she’s got to hold her weight. Jovovich does more than that. By the end of the film, hers is the only character left worth caring about.

This also makes complete sense. Regardless of how you feel about them at any point in time during the story, Stone (Norton) and Jack (De Niro) aren’t the kind of people you root for. The first scene, a flashback, shows Jack as a catatonic individual, a zombie before a TV. His wife threatens to leave him. He explodes, runs up to the second floor of their house, and dangles his daughter out the window. There aren’t any hints in Stone that he’s done something worse than that over the ensuing years, but it’s obvious that he’s smoldering, just waiting for something to set him off. Until then, it’s the same routine everyday: Wake up, go to work, go to the liquor store, drink self to sleep. Stone isn’t much better. He’s a convicted arsonist who wants out of jail, and his every action, his every word is crafted with that goal in mind. He’s obviously pushing Jack’s buttons, hoping to find the right one. He studies the religions. All of them. He has cordial conversations. He tells his wife (Jovovich) to meet with Jack outside the confines of your typical, non-existent parole officer/wife of prisoner relationship. Stone converts to a religion called Zukangor, which posits that life is a series of responses to plucked strings. It seems awful relevant to Jack’s situation with Lucetta, who is trying to seduce him. Maybe too relevant. But it’s hard to tell if Stone is really a convert to Zukangor or if he’s just going through the motions, hoping to play Jack as a religious sap.

The movie does nothing but smolder, and much of it revolves around Jovovich’s Lucetta, who, it seems, is willing to do anything if it means seeing her husband free from prison. She married him only a few months before he was locked up, has hook-ups with a few men, but still makes the visits and is willing to seduce a dead-eyed old man like Jack. The situation makes Jack’s home life with his wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy) all the more tense. He starts drinking more. She starts quoting more scripture. Lucetta genuinely appears to want Jack, who stays out with her later and later. Meanwhile Stone enters an almost meditative state. He’s uninvolved in prison life in every way but proximity and sees Jack for what he is.

But, in the end, it’s hard to say exactly who Stone or even Lucetta are or what they represent for Jack, who doesn’t so much fall apart so much as he shuts himself in for an imagined siege. Though you can see Jack’s fuse burning, though you can see the look of Stone’s eyes, and though you can feel Lucetta’s warmth, these elements don’t converge at the center to become something more than a study of three very different human beings. Their lives don’t intersect, even though the plot of the movie says that they must. Without a true sense of connection, the fuse continues to burn in vain. Even when it reaches the bomb, by the looks of things, it’ll be a dud.

Rating:

Stone. Directed by John Curran. With Robert De Niro (Jack Mabry), Edward Norton (Gerald “Stone” Creeson), Milla Jovovich (Lucetta Creeson), and Madylyn Maybry (Frances Conroy). Released October 10, 2010, by Relativity Media.