Remake lacks the magic touch
Snow White gets a makeover in Mirror Mirror, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The Montreal-shot retelling of the famous fairy tale is salvaged by some snappy dialogue, a few updated plot devices and scattered moments of visual splendour – so why does it fall so flat?
Julia Roberts tries her best to keep us entertained as Snow White’s evil stepmother, Queen Clementianna. She leads off the story, looking into an egg-shaped crystal ball and reciting the mashed-up intro, “Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away.”
This is the story of “a baby girl whose skin was white as snow, and whose hair was dark as night,” she continues, informing us that the girl was called Snow White “because that was the most pretentious name they could come up with.” Such nudge-wink asides are aplenty in this film. But The Princess Bride it is not.
Attempts at banter are merely mildly amusing, not bust-a-gut hilarious, and not nearly as witty as they’re intended to be.
Though she is characteristically peppy, Roberts can’t evoke real fear, and doesn’t even come across as particularly nasty. That’s a problem when she’s supposed to be the bad guy. Yes, yes, she has been keeping Snow White (Lily Collins) locked up for the past 10 years, since the mysterious disappearance of the girl’s father.
At the behest of one of her maids, Snow White slips out to see how the overtaxed townsfolk are faring under her stepmom’s despotic rule. On her way, she crosses paths with a charming prince (Arnie Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The So- cial Network), who has just been robbed by a certain seven dwarfs in the enchanted forest.
Full disclosure: my father was among the stilt-walking stunt performers for the dwarfs’ robbery scenes, which are among the few relatively magical moments in the film (and I’m not just saying that cause he’s my dad – okay, maybe I am).
Further disclosure com- pels me to inform you that my good friend Alex Ivanovici impresses with several lines as the kindly Town Magistrate.
Long story short, Queen Clementianna tries to woo the prince, while Snow White escapes death and begins hanging out with the dastardly dwarfs – with updated names including Half-pint, Grimm and Napoleon). Insert more banter, here, and take the chuckles where you can get them; there is little else to entertain as this tired tale plods along toward its underwhelming finale.
Though director Tarsem Singh desperately wants it to be an oh-so-hip reimagining of a classic, Mirror Mirror is but a lazily written, pale imitation. It would have done better to stick more closely to its source material – we don’t even get to hear the line, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” Those Brothers Grimm might have been twisted, but they knew how tell a story.
Hopes now rest with the more dramatic Snow White and The Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron, due out in June.