Film review: Mirror Mirror (PG)

LIKE most fairy tales, Mirror Mirror begins with “once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after”, but everything else in Tarsem Singh’s revamp of Snow White is up for grabs.

The film’s biggest coup is to get Julia Roberts to play the wicked stepmother who, like Madonna, keeps misplacing her British accent, and has brought Snow White’s kingdom to the point of bankruptcy with her reckless overspending on clothes and beauty treatments.

In one of the movie’s better conceived scenes, she gets herself brightened and tightened in a medieval spa where real wasps produce bee-stung lips, parrot droppings smooth her skin and fish nibble a manicure. She’s also ferociously jealous of her stepdaughter Snow White (Lily Collins). Wait a minute: Julia Roberts is jealous of the bland girl who played second fiddle to Taylor Lautner in the flop film Abducted? Is this a fairytale, or science fiction?

Following tradition, Snow White has hair as black as coal and skin as white as snow, but the film throws in sword skills too.

The revisionist kernel of Mirror Mirror is that this modern gal won’t sit around hoping that one day her prince (Armie Hammer, who played both Winklevosses in The Social Network) will come.

Instead, she rescues him and his manservant after they are left tied up in the forest, and when she heads out into the forest and meets the seven dwarves, her traditional washing, tidying and cooking for them brings a return favour where they teach her ninja techniques, like seven versions of Mr Miyagi in The Karate Kid.

Incidentally, the dwarves no longer work down a diamond mine. Instead they are bandits, forced into lawlessness after they were banished by the wicked stepmother when she passed her “Exile the Uglies” law.

Now they roam the forest, mugging the unwary – including Prince Alcott – while wearing stylish accordion stilts apparently borrowed from Cirque Du Soleil.

It’s all a bit hit or miss. For every moment where Hammer protests that the prince saving the day has always played well with focus groups, or Roberts cougars up to Hammer, growling “Get this man a shirt, I can’t concentrate”, there’s a bundle of scenes with Collins emoting like Anne Hathaway with her batteries on the wane, or a tacked-on Bollywood finale that makes no emotional or narrative sense.

This is the first of two versions of the dwarf-consorting, apple-consuming princess we’ll be seeing this year; The Huntsman opens in autumn, and signals its intension to be all moody and atmospheric by casting Twilight’s Incredible Sulk Kristen Stewart as the princess.

Mirror Mirror, meanwhile, is less a product of gothic angst and more the result of combining old copies of Vogue and jokes that even Shrek The Third would reject as too old.

Tarsem Singh has directed some of the best-looking movies of recent years; The Cell, The Fall and Immortals amongst them. His costumes are sumptuous, the stars look lush, and the art direction is dazzling. If only his scripts were couture too. Younger children might enjoy Mirror Mirror because it’s bright, shiny and pretty. And fashionistas may appreciate the moment where Collins becomes only the second person after Björk to try to wear a swan as a dress. But the rest of us merely wonder how a fairytale can be such a Grimm exercise.

On general release from tomorrow

Rating: ***