Mirrors
- Year:2008
- Rating:MA
- Director:Alexandre Aja
- Cast:Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Kiefer Sutherland
- Release Date:November 06, 2008
- Distributor:20th Century Fox
- Running time:110 minutes
- Film Worth:$9.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
“…the story fizzles out…”
French Director Alexandre Aja is a man who loves to portray horror, violence and gore. His last two directorial efforts, the French film Haute Tension and his first American feature, The Hills Have Eyes, strongly attest to this. Now his latest, the supernatural thriller Mirrors starring Kiefer Sutherland, does the same; though the premise is interesting enough, the storyline tends to run out of puff well before the end credits roll.
Sutherland plays Ben Carson, a former cop suspended after accidentally shooting an undercover policeman. From this experience, Carson takes up a job as a security officer on the night shift looking after an old department store that has been gutted by a fire. On his nightly rounds, Carson begins to see eerie visions in the store's mirrors. At first, he puts these episodes down as hallucinatory dreams because of the medication that he is taking. Soon he begins to uncover the evil truths lurking in these mirrored reflections.
If Sutherland is trying to break away from his alter ego Jack Bauer from 24, then sadly he will be finding it hard. As good an actor as he is, when watching Kiefer in the department store holding a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other on the hunt for demons, you can't help but think it's Jack Bauer still on the prowl for terrorists.
Aja has done a credible enough job in bringing out the atmosphere and dread of this department store with a past. The gutted-out sets look fantastic, and a true sense of eeriness saturates much of the film. Certain scenes, however, tend to cut abruptly from one to the next, and in the end, the story fizzles out, with the second stanza bordering on the downright farcical.
