Mirror Mirror: A shattering disappointment

Mirror Mirror (2012) • View trailer
Two stars. Rating: PG, and needlessly, for fantasy violence and mild rude humor
By Derrick Bang


Ever have one of those days when everything goes wrong?

Tarsem Singh had an entire film’s worth.

Snow White (Lily Collins, right) finds herself quite unwelcome at a lavish ball
given by her evil step-mother (Julia Roberts), who warns the girl — with dire
threats of reprisal — to refrain from crashing any future parties. Alas, we'd have
no story if Snow obeyed this edict, and besides: The next gathering will be
thrown in honor of the handsome prince who just arrived at the castle.

Either that, or the woefully under-prepared director slept through the entire shooting schedule of Mirror Mirror. Rarely has so much gone wrong, in so many obvious ways.

In fairness, there’s plenty of blame to spread among numerous other folks, starting with Melisa Wallack and Jason Keller, and their impressively clumsy script: no more than a “greatest hits” effort to beg, borrow or steal bits, concepts and even atmosphere from far better predecessors.

This is less a screenplay, and more a cynical attempt at formulaic success: the plot-establishing prologue, in a stylized artistic montage, from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast; a queen’s court comprised of decadent, garishly dressed aristocratic grotesques, from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland; the bickering, roughly garbed but technologically adroit dwarfs, from Time Bandits; the occasional exaggerated twinkle of eye or tooth, from Blake Edwards’ The Great Race; and mostly the quirky blend of fairy-tale clichés and contemporary snark, from The Princess Bride.

Heck, I’m pretty sure somebody even says “As you wish,” with the same sort of inflection.

Unfortunately, mimicking so much, from so many earlier sources, is no guarantee of doing it well ... and, indeed, Mirror Mirror merely makes one yearn for all those other, far better films.

In a word, it’s a mess.

A rather boring mess, at that.

Which is a shame, because it’s certainly well-cast. Julia Roberts and Nathan Lane bring the appropriate brio to their ham-on-wry performances as, respectively, the evil queen and her cowering sycophant; Lily Collins deftly matures from fragile, sheltered princess to resolute champion of the kingdom; Armie Hammer is properly virtuous and heroic as the dashing young prince; and the dwarfs — in this case dubbed Grub, Grimm, Wolf, Butcher, Napoleon, Half-Pint and Chuckles (because he never laughs) — are a squabbling hoot.

They give their all, but it’s all for nothing. Because nothing else works.

Swing Vote: Count on Kevin

Swing Vote (2008) • View trailer for Swing Vote
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for quite a bit of (good-natured) profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.31.08
Buy DVD: Swing Vote • Buy Blu-Ray: Swing Vote [Blu-ray]


Although the movie industry occasionally dabbles in politics, the results usually emerge as a comedy or a thriller: either way, nothing to be taken seriously.

And when filmmakers try to be serious, the results usually fall far short of expectations. Last year's Lions for Lambs became the most recent flop to "prove" an ancient Hollywood truism: Politics is the kiss of death to a film, as far as box office results are concerned.

Career goof-off Bud Johnson (Kevin Coster) finally gets a sense of his pivotal
place in history after confronting the sacks of mail from citizens across the
entire United States: letters that his far more sensitive daughter, Molly
(Madeline Carroll) has been answering in his name, so that all these people
don't think that her father is letting them down.

Indeed, one could cite the truly great American political films on the fingers of one hand: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, All the King's Men (the 1949 version), The Candidate and Wag the Dog come to mind, with Thirteen Days and Primary Colors perhaps ranking as recent near-misses.

Director/co-writer Joshua Michael Stern and fellow scribe Jason Richman deserve considerable credit, then, for their sharply observed screenplay in Swing Vote, a deceptively quiet little comedy-drama that takes an increasingly perceptive poke at the modern American political machine. And if the behavior of our two political parties, as this story progresses, doesn't really seem that bizarre ... well, then, more's the pity.

Swing Vote also demonstrates, yet again, the amazing resilience of star Kevin Costner. This guy's career has had more peaks and valleys than most, but every time he threatens to become known only for ill-advised projects — Dragonfly and Rumor Has It come to mind, and even last year's cleverly conceived Mr. Brooks was a financial disappointment — he rebounds with another one of his well-timed and perfectly cast Americana roles: think Bull Durham, Tin Cup, Open Range and now Swing Vote.

Costner slides comfortably into his part here as Bud Johnson, an apathetic, smart-mouthed but usually amiable loser who drinks too much and can't be bothered to do more than just slide by. He and his precocious 12-year-old daughter, Molly (Madeline Carroll, a thorough delight), live in a dilapidated mobile home, where he crashes each night after too many beers, following another demoralizing factory shift where he packages eggs on an assembly line.

Molly is Bud's "one good thing," but he takes unconscionable advantage of the girl, who too often finds herself being the parent in their family dynamic: She makes all the meals, cleans things up and hauls him out of bed each morning, so he can drive her to school ... although, as we quickly learn, she's capable of driving herself, having gotten considerable practice every time Bud goes on a bender.

Bud and Molly live in flyspeck Texico, N.M., a community so tiny that it isn't even on the map. As a result, local interest in the impending presidential election is somewhat lax, with pollworkers likely to fall asleep from sheer boredom.

But Molly takes civic duty quite seriously. A well- received school essay comes to the attention of local TV reporter Kate Madison (Paula Patton), who puts the girl on the evening news; this plays right into the most recent promise Molly has extracted from her father, who has agreed to let her write about his voting experience that same evening.