Surely It Would Have Been Quicker To Call Rentakill???? (Mimic (DVD))

Name: wampyrii

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Mimic (DVD)
Date:	30/12/01 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see review

Disadvantages: see review

Mimic is an excellent title for this movie. In fact, it mimics numerous horror/sci-fi movies of recent years in producing a relatively entertaining but hardly original waste of around 2 hours of your viewing time. Take the premise of Aliens or The Thing amongst others, give it a tweak in location, killer beastie(s) and cast members and you have Mimic all packaged up and ready for consumption. If I said it was a B-movie horror movie then you will probably already know whether you want to watch it or not...

...or maybe that isn’t enough information because there is actually an enormous amount of talent on show here both on screen and behind the screens. Fans of the horror genre will recognise the director as the man behind the camera on the acclaimed horror flick Cronos which gave the whole vampire genre a much needed kick in the tail. You’ll also notice Stephen Soderburgh amongst the scriptwriters and two Academy award winning actors in the form of Mira Sorvino and F. Murray Abraham in front of the camera as well as a few other recognisable and generally dependable faces. Its a shame then that we are once again treated to a “bug hunt” to steal a phrase from another similar movie...well, Mimic borrows liberally from its betters does, so I’m going to have a piece as well whilst here ;o)

The story here is a very familiar one once things start rolling. The setting is New York and a mysterious virus is killing off the city’s children in droves. It seems that there is no cure for the disease once caught but eventually the carriers of it are tracked down to the millions of cockroaches which infest all large cities. Scientist Susan Tyler(Mira Sorvino) comes up with the brainwave of infesting the city with a genetically modified voracious bug which will wipe out the cockroach population and therefore hopefully eliminate the disease. Rather than replace one problem with a perhaps bigger one this new breed, named the Judas B
reed, has been genetically modified so that it is not only sterile but has a life expectancy of only 6 months...it seems the problem is eliminated and life can go on. Then things begin to look a little less rosy as Tyler finds out that nature has a way of overcoming such little things as infertility(shades of Jurassic Park) and it becomes evident that the bugs have taken up refuge in the sewers where they have not only mutated but are also preparing to swarm the city! Umm naturally faced with such a catastrophe, rather than alert the authorities our supposedly intelligent scientist goes into the sewers with a couple of others in a bid to track down and eliminate the creepy crawlies on her own...

Yup, its a bug hunt. Running around a maze with all the exits blocked off is hardly the most original idea even though the location may be changed from The Nostromo, or a North Pole research station etc. but it works and it works again here. The problem is that it is difficult for a movie to be scary when you have seen the ideas presented a million times before and the ‘shocks’ are preceded by(and sometimes consist of nothing more than) a building of music before the sudden all too expected burst of noise when the now all too expected attack happens. Guillermo Del Torro is a good director and he does know how to add suspense into his movies, but with such a hackneyed premise there isn’t really that much he can do here to lift it above the mediocre...which is where Mimic remains firmly rooted. The acting performances do little to lift this, Sorvino seeming somewhat miscast when you consider her previous airheaded roles and all but Dutton pretty much sleepwalking through their parts. Dutton does seem to be enjoying his role at least whilst F. Murray Abraham is given such a small part that his presence seems entirely wasted.

Miramax’s exploitation wing Dimension Films brought us the Scream trilogy and seems to be playing on that oneR
17;s success somewhat with its later releases. Whilst this can not be accused of being of the abysmal standard of their latest atrocity Dracula 2000 which has all the hallmarks of a space-filler, it is also not a movie which seems to have had a lot of thought ploughed into it either. Mimic isn’t a bad movie its just not very original and therefore ends up being a sci-fi/horror movie which neither intrigues you in the way that a good sci-fi ought to nor scares or shocks you like a good horror movie should either. Its just a routine run through of old ideas which is does rather well, but you have to ask whether that’s what you want from a movie? Personally I see it as a good way to waste an hour or so if its free to watch but its not something you would want to go out of your way to track down or purchase.

Summary: