A sorry reflection of Hollywood's void

Published on Thursday 9 October 2008 19:55

MIRRORS (15) * DIRECTED BY: ALEXANDRE AJA STARRING: KIEFER SUTHERLAND, AMY SMART

STILL not reflecting his 24-inspired career rehabilitation, Mirrors finds Kiefer Sutherland starring once again in the kind of straight-to-DVD-quality trash he would have made during his post-Brat Pack wilderness years. It's the latest Asian horror flick to be given a make-over, this time by French director Alexandre Aja, who deploys neither the tension of Switchblade Romance nor the intensity of his The Hills Have Eyes remake to tell this story about an evil force that stalks its prey through the looking glass. Sutherland plays its latest target, a disgraced detective who takes a job as a security guard in an old New York department store. The previous employee died in mysterious circumstances, and Sutherland looks to be heading for the same fate as the demon terrorises him while he's doing his nightly rounds, then starts terrorising his estranged family through the mirrors in their home. Frequently straying outside of the parameters it sets up for itself in order to spin this sliver of hokum into a feature-length movie, the only thing Mirrors reflects is how bereft of imagination Hollywood is.

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE (PG)

**

DIRECTED BY: GEORGE C WOLFE

STARRING: RICHARD GERE, DIANE LANE, SCOTT GLENN, JAMES FRANCO

DEPENDING on your disposition, this latest Nicholas Sparks adaptation (the man who penned the blockbuster novels A Walk to Remember and that notorious tear-jerker, The Notebook) is either a three-hankie weepie or a three barf-bag vomit fest. Either way it's shamelessly sentimental and blatantly manipulative, piling ludicrous tragic plot twist upon ludicrous tragic plot twist in such a ruthlessly mechanical way it robs the film of any genuine charm or emotional resonance. Diane Lane is Adrienne, a harassed single mother several months into a separation from her cheating husband. With a teenage daughter who hates her and an increasingly withdrawn son, she decides to get some space by agreeing to run her best friend's beachfront hotel for a few days. The only guest is Paul (Richard Gere), a plastic surgeon in town to atone for a past mistake and ruminate on how to patch up things with his estranged son. You can guess what happens from here on in and neither Lane nor Gere manages to give this clunky melodrama the buoyancy it needs to prevent it drowning in a sea of clichs.

MUTANT CHRONICLES (18)

*

DIRECTED BY: SIMON HUNTER

STARRING: THOMAS JANE, RON PERLMAN, JOHN MALKOVICH

GIVEN how cheap-looking this dismal new fantasy thriller is, it's hard to fathom quite what attracted the likes of John Malkovich and Hellboy's Ron Perlman. It certainly can't have been much of a bill-payer (not in the traditional Hollywood sense), so maybe it was just the thrill of ripe dialogue such as "the lack of gravity plays havoc with my digestion" – something Malkovich gets to utter here. Malkovich plays the head of a corporation charged with trying to unite the last remnants of humanity in an effort to defeat a race of human-harvesting necromutants which have been unleashed by the perpetual battling of the warring conglomerates that rule the world. Perlman is the monastic leader with a secret plan to save the planet. This involves recruiting a dirty half-dozen of maverick soldiers (led by Thomas Jane) to embark on a suicide mission to destroy the mutants with an ancient bomb. In case you hadn't realised, this is based on a role-playing game, which in itself would be reason enough to avoid this movie, though the film helpfully provides plenty of others.

GOMORRAH (15)

***

DIRECTED BY: MATTEO GARRONE

STARRING: SALVATORE ABRUZZESE, SIMONE SACCHETTINO, SALVATORE RUOCCO

THIS based-on-fact Italian crime drama is getting a lot of hype at the moment, much of it down to the relative novelty of seeing an Italian film that deals with organised crime instead of filtering it through the glamorised viewpoint of Hollywood. There's nothing glamorous about the Camorra, a Mafia-like Neapolitan crime syndicate believed to be responsible for 4,000 deaths in the past 30 years and a poisonous presence in all aspects of life in the region, from street kids to supposedly legitimate businessmen. According to Gomorrah, its reach is so great it can even influence the fashion choices of the Hollywood elite. Befitting this viral presence in society, the film – which is based on a best-selling factual account by Robert Saviano – serves up a series of interwoven storylines that show how everything is connected and how little morality exists when it comes to making money. That's an admirable way to approach such a complex story, but something just got lost in translation or the biblical scope of the story was a little beyond director Matteo Garrone, meaning it is frequently dense to the point of impenetrability.