Mirrors 2

“I started seeing things... but I’m not crazy.” Losing touch with your own reflection? Don’t hate your image, it may hate you back. MIRRORS 2 (2010) is a sequel to Alexandre Aja’s 2008 remake of clever Korean mystery–chiller Into The Mirror (2003). Max (Nick Stahl, that ‘yellow bastard’ in Sin City) had a breakdown and suffers misplaced guilt over surviving the car accident which killed his fiancée. He takes a new job as security guard at his father’s commercial property, but adopts the bad habit of seeing premonitory visions of death.  

 

As directed by Victor Garcia, maker of Return To House On Haunted Hill (a sequel to a remake), and yet another pointless sequel, 30 Days Of Night: Blood Trail, Mirrors 2 is further evidence that here’s a filmmaker making a name for himself as someone without any obvious ambition or creative merits that involve any measure of originality (note: Garcia’s next picture was Hellraiser: Revelations). Anyway, Max’s sympathetic dad, Jack (William Katt), owns a shopping centre in New Orleans. The building is visibly haunted and is due for re–opening, like those in Aja’s New York, and in that Korean film. Have shop ghosts gone viral?

Waitress/ heroine Elizabeth (always busy B–movie starlet Emmanuelle Vaugier, Far Cry, Dolan’s Cadillac) is concerned for her missing sister, who Max ogles in mirrors. Twisted perceptions and looking-glass unreality conceals a comparatively mundane rape and murder crime. Needless flashbacks, some inserted with extreme clumsiness into climactic sequences, deflate what little suspense is generated here. Despite clichéd scripting and WYSIWYG plot construction, Mirrors 2 does boast a couple of impressively staged/ visualised death scenes (decapitation in shower, ‘self’ disembowelment).

 

Overall, it is predictable and distinctly un–involving but nonetheless watchable as a below average time–waster. Sequel trains do need to jump off the rails, and be unpredictable, if filmmakers ever hope to create a worthwhile follow–up instead of just a carry-on. More sightseeing from a continuance of the original journey is simply insufficient to appeal to discerning genre–literate viewers who have seen it all before.