Movie Review: MIRROR MIRROR

Release Date: March 30, 2012
Directed by: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar
Screenplay by: Marc Klein and Jason Keller
Story by: Melisa Wallack
Based on the fairy tale by: The Brothers Grimm
Cast: Julia Roberts, Lily Collins, Armie Hammer, Nathan Lane, Mare Winningham
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Rating = PG

Terrible things are happening in the kingdom. Poverty, eternal winter, exorbitant taxes … but that’s nothing next to the pandemic lethargy that’s afflicted every last shard of this particular Mirror Mirror. But let’s not blame Julia Robert’s pernicious Queen. Rather, it’s Tarsem Singh’s flaccid direction, hindered by the lackluster screenplay (Marc Klein and Jason Keller) and story (Melisa Wallack) that deserves a royal condemnation of the highest order.

After flatly intoning lines with little comic spark, the actors hold for laughs, as if they were on stage. Players aimlessly ramble out of the frame, as if they, too, were extras gathered on some theater’s proscenium and had just been instructed to exit into the wings. While costumes are inventive, given the empty characters that they adorn, we can only appreciate the outrageous silks, satins and feathers so much.

Singh, who’d previously directed such non-comedies as Immortals, The Fall, The Cell, was supposedly the optimum choice. The film’s producer Bernie Goldmann crows, “Tarsem was the perfect filmmaker to direct this film … There’s no one else like him.” Is Mr. Goldmann suffering under some spell as well?

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