Hollywood loves competing movie projects. Competing volcanos! Competing end of the world stories! Competing Titanics! (Okay, one was on the small screen.) Competing bug movies! I actually tend to believe that it’s more a case of “something gets into the water” rather than “oh gosh, they have a good idea, let’s get our own.” It’s too hard to make a movie in the first place without someone really being behind it.
So here we have Live Action Snow White #1. (#2, Snow White and the Huntsman, is coming this summer.) Mirror, Mirror starts with the conceit that this is the story of the Evil Stepmother, since she’s played by the biggest star in the movie, Julia Roberts. The Queen is evil, a handsome Prince comes to the kingdom, Snow White runs away to avoid Evil Stepmother Queen’s clutches, she gets rescued by seven dwarves, she fights the Prince, she defeats the Evil Stepmother, she rescues the Prince, the kingdom is saved.
If this is the Evil Stepmother’s story, you may have noticed a problem midway through my recounting this movie.
The movie’s kind of a mess. It doesn’t know who the main character is either.
It’s directed by Tarsem Singh, whose main notable attribute is his gift for visuals. Big splashes of colors! Fantastic scenery! If Tarsem Singh and Zach Snyder could just learn what a story was, they would really have something going. A problem both directors suffer from, however, is that they are more interested in the visual on-screen than in what the hell is going on in the story.
The movie is definitely geared toward kids most of the time — the Prince gets affected by a magical spell that makes him act very silly indeed — although there were a couple of moments for adults that made me say, “Really? Did you have to put that in there?” The seven dwarves are very amusing — I liked them most of the time they were on screen, and they had the best dialogue. My kids mainly talked about the dwarves after the movie was over, so I’m thinking that was their favorite part too. Lily Collins is Snow White, and she’s very sweet and demure, and Julia Roberts eats as much scenery as she dares. Armie Hammer seems to have a pretty good time, despite spending a third of the movie half-naked. (And as I tweeted yesterday: Seriously, what must it be like to look like that? Does he spend most of his waking hours staring at himself in a mirror? Because if I were a guy and I looked like that, I sure would. I don’t even find that type of guy attractive and I would lose my ability to speak around him.)
There’s nothing stunningly original or even funny about this movie though. Maybe if they’d stuck with the Evil-Queen-as-heroine story, or had some other twist in there that would make this original. But mostly it’s a matinee-with-the-kids-’cause-we’ve-seen-everything-else type of movie.
We’re all kind of wondering how Snow White and the Huntsman is going to be.