MIRRORS

Director: Alexandre Aja

Stars: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Mary Beth Peil

Year: 2008

Rating: R

(NOTE: I saw the "Unrated" version of the film.) The concept of this film - that mirrors (or mirror images) don't reflect us, so much as an entire world beyond us - is a kind of a cool one. As executed (no pun intended) here by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), however, the concept falls a bit flat with a fairly emotionless script that has a few good-sized holes in the plot.

Kiefer Sutherland stars as Ben Carson, a quick-tempered New York City cop currently on probation while the police investigate his accidental shooting of an undercover officer. The incident has taken its toll on Ben, too - he became an alcoholic and lost his wife and two children, now sleeping on his sister's couch - but he's on the mend and off the booze, and has just landed a job he doesn't want as a security guard for the Mayflower Corporation. Trouble is, we the viewers saw - in the first ten minutes of the film - what happened to the guard Ben is replacing ... and know things are going to get bad for Ben again real fast.

The Mayflower was a mammoth department store on 6th Avenue that was torched years earlier by a guy named Terrence Berry. The fire killed several dozen people, wounding many more, and what's left are the scorched, skeletal remains of the great monolith of a store, blocked off by wooden construction fences while the powers that be decide what to do with it. Ben's duty as the night watchman is to patrol the store every couple of hours, to make sure things are okay - but from his first night through the store, Ben soon learns that things inside its great walls are not okay.

There are great walls of mirrors throughout every floor, and over his first nights on the job Ben sees some horrific images in them - including himself on fire, when one evening his mirror image spontaneously bursts into flames and Ben hits the ground screaming, feeling the pain as if it were happening for real. Worse yet, the incidents start happening to him outside the Mayflower as well - in any mirror, or reflecting surface - and when his sister Angela (Amy Smart, fairly wasted here) is visited by the spirits in the mirror - in one hell of a grisly manner - Ben has no choice (especially upon realizing that his wife and kids are next) but to find out what the mirrors want from him ... and why they spell out the name "Esseker" whenever he asks what they seek.

Mirrors isn't a horrible, or even bad movie ... it's just sort of - there. The special effects are very cool, the gore tolerable but still gross enough to please fans of blood and guts (though the body count in this film may be too low for such aficionados), and Kiefer Sutherland (along with his gravelly voice) turns in a solid-if-not-great performance as troubled cop Ben Carson.

But the story has its problems, and occasionally characters act and do things that don't seem realistic in light of their personality or the situation they're in. Mary Beth Peil has an outstanding supporting role in the film as a nun who holds the key to the whole story, and Paula Patton does a great job as Ben's estranged wife Amy. Even the ending has a nice little surprise to cap off the film.

But as whole, Mirrors just ... left a sort of void in me as a viewer. It's like all the parts - or at least, most of them - are there all right, yet somehow it all doesn't seem to come off as well as it should. Kind of like that picture - or mirror - on the wall that you've just hung up: it looks straight, and yet it doesn't ... and no matter what you do to tilt it, to the left and then to the right, it just never seems quite right. **1/2 - Reel Mediocre-Reel Cool