You always know you're taking a risk when you watch a film purely because of an actor you recognise. In the case of Kiefer Sutherland in Mirrors, this was a risk very worth taking. However, despite some reasonable acting by Dominic Purcell, this film leaves a lot to be desired.
The tragedy is it all starts so well: you're dragged kicking and screaming, as the woman in its introduction, wondering how or why a poltergeist wished to hang this victim. We are then brought in to the seemingly unrelated escapades of a bunch of people who's friend has just died.
Alarm bells start ringing with the two dimensional, lazy drug addict friend of our protagonist. "Why don't we go to the gravestone and get drunk?" He said. Well at least I think he did, I didn't really care to remember. This bloke borders on annoying, acting like an unrealistic caricature of a cross between Kevin the Teenager and The Dude.
Thankfully most of the story is still passable. The scares are well thought out and the tension in the main characters relationship is rather gripping. You're led wondering whether the hauntings are actually a result of the infidelity of Dominic's character rather than the initially suspected grave dancing, which to me seemed a very silly and metaphor-taken-literally idea for a film. Could these hauntings be a physical manifestation of his guilt?
Don't count on it. This seems more a lucky coincidence which could easily be mistaken at this point for talent.
Everything really goes wrong about halfway through, when our heroes team up with the cartoon-like "paranormal activity hunters" it seems every horror movie is required to include now. You all almost expect by the end of the film that Scooby will come to take the mask from the monsters only to find it was this mass scientist all along.
On the subject of masks, these really are some of the worst demon make up manifestations to ever grace our screen. It seems they ran out of budget at the halfway point and just got Halloween masks to represent the towns worst murderers, sadists and rapists.
Then in the last 30 minutes everything breaks down into a nightmare of awkward motives, clichéd dialogue and 80s special effects that Ghostbusters manages to beat.
The biggest tragedy is that anyone survived in the end at all. At least we can have fun imagining the prison break music in the background when Dominic is around.
