Mimic (1997)

reviewed by
Brandon Stahl


"Mimic": *1/2 out of four. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Starring Mira Sorvino, Josh Brolin, and Charles S. Dutton.

As bad as "Mimic" was, it definitly scared me. "Mimic" continued the frightening Hollywood trend of taking a foreign director who shows a lot of creative ingenuity and style, and completely flushing it when he comes to America to make a movie.

Director Guillermo Del Toro was recently imported from Mexico after he made the award winning and inventive horror film "Cronos." That movie worked because it took an unconventional story, unique characters and well written plot and dialogue to create a truly scary movie. In "Mimic", Del Toro doesn't bother to give us anything original. The plot is a stupid combination of "Aliens" meets "Species" meets "Jurassic Park." The characters have been recycled from a few hundred other movies. There's nothing new in "Mimic". It's just a bunch of old tricks that rarely work. At the end of the movie, you're stuck wanting your money back.

Maybe the worst thing about the movie is that Del Toro followed another annoying trend of recent movies: he forgot to turn the lights on. I don't understand why suspense movies lately have to follow the "Seven" trend and be set in dark, dank areas. Watching "Mimic" I was tempted several times to yell at the screen "Turn the lights on! The switch is to your right! Use common sense! Just do it! You'll be able to see the monster in the corner!" There's a scene where Mira Sorvino is standing in subway station while the lights are flickering on and off. It looked like the light operator was having a seizure, and Sorvino didn't even notice - she just stood there looking like she was having deep thoughts. "Hmmm.... I think bean soup would be good for dinner tonight."

"Mimic" has a lot of incidental shock tactics (Boo! Just kidding!) and follows them up with the real scare, but nothing in this movie scares you. The audience in the theater never jumped during suspenseful moments; I think they were bored, too.

I shouldn't blame Del Toro. He isn't the first successful foreign director to come to Hollywood and make a bad movie. Hong Kong director John Woo made two of the best action films of all time, "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" then came to America to make the stupid "Broken Arrow." French directors Luc Besson ("La Femme Nikita") and George Sluizer ("The Vanishing") followed Woo's lead and made dumbed down versions of those movies. Robert Rodriguez, who directed the terrific low budget "El Mariachi" came to Hollywood and directed the horrible, high-budget "Desperado."

I don't know why a foreign director who shows such talent in his country can't make a good American movie. Woo finally broke through and made "Face/Off", but it still isn't up to par with his earlier films.

I get the feeling a Hollywood producer sits in his office, chews on a big smelly cigar and says to the director, "Welcome to America! I bet you must be tired after being on that boat for so long. Do you speak English? Now, I know you think you've made good movies in the past, but now you're in America, so things are a little different here. Just remember what the American audience always wants, and you'll be fine. They want to see at least one big breasted woman, characters that they've seen a thousand times before (because change scares Americans), and you always need a cheesy feel-good ending to wrap things up. If you don't make that kind of movie, you'll be shining my shoes in no time."


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