Stars: Lily Collins, Julia Roberts, Armie Hammer, Nathan Lane
Director: Tarsem Singh
Rated: PG
Showing: Liberty Theatre week of Friday, April 6. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 106 minutes
Comedy/drama
Daft, dazzling in design but straining ever so hard to be hip, Mirror Mirror isn't your Uncle Walt's Snow White.
It's still kid-friendly, with lots of positive messages, especially for young girls. But this flip and sometimes funny take on the classic fairytale is a mash-up of many such tales, packing in bits of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, with a touch of Robin Hood for good measure. And as a movie, eye-candy specialist Tarsem Singh borrows from Zorro, Time Bandits and his own The Cell and The Fall.
Anything to dress up one of the blander fairytale heroines from the Grimm Brothers' canon. Anything to hide that fact that his Snow White is too perfectly cast to play bland. Lily Collins, the gorgeous, bushy-browed daughter of pop singer Phil Collins, conjures up memories of generations of models turned movie stars. Not since Francis Ford Coppola slapped his daughter Sofia into Godfather III have we seen a performance this dull, whispered and charisma free.
Julia Roberts is the wicked queen/evil stepmother, and this story is ostensibly told from her point of view. That would have been a novel take, only they lost their nerve and didn't follow through with it.
Roberts brings a hint of glee to playing a broad screen villain. But only a hint. She, too, lost her nerve. Look at Susan Sarandon's take on this character in Enchanted to see how it's supposed to be done.
The queen has dispatched Snow White's dad, and thanks to her vanity and her hunger for power, she aims to do the same to Snow White. But there's a visiting prince (Armie Hammer of The Social Network) who could interfere. And the forest is full of dwarves - robbing, quarrelsome, wise-cracking dwarfs.
These guys, led by Danny Woodburn (of Seinfeld) and Martin Klebba (who stole Project X) are the life of Mirror Mirror, an otherwise spotty attempt at capturing the tone of Enchanted.
Mirror Mirror, the first of this year's two live-action Snow Whites (Kristen Stewart and an evil Charlize Theron star in the darker Snow White and the Huntsman this summer), has amazing images, from the opening Once upon a time animation to the castle that looks like no fairytale castle you've ever seen, and the snowy forest that doesn't quite seem real.
But the actual “Mirror mirror on the wall" effect shows you where Mirror Mirror started to go wrong. The queen steps through an amazing liquid mirror and into an alternate reality where she steps out of a lake and into a fanciful dockside wooden hut. And there? Another mirror, where a cadaverously made-up alter ego Roberts listens to the demands of the queen. Beautiful, but pointless and redundant.
If only they'd put more "Heigh Ho" into the script, found more funny things for Nathan Lane (the queen's aide) to say and do. If only Roberts had had the guts to play mean. If only they'd found a Snow White with some spark to her.
Mirror Mirror leaves us with those "if onlys" and reminds us that the original incantation missed the big point. Casting "the fairest of them all" can't save you from a heroine as dull as her character's name.
Next attraction: The Three Stooges