2 out of 5

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Let’s first just admit that del Toro’s horror entries are not scary – they’re moody.  Generally fully visualized set design and some great framing, but movies like Cronos and Devil’s Backbone are more interesting due to their stories and themes than they are in the primal edge-of-your-seat sense of traditional horror.  Part of this is due to GdT’s thankful avoidance (mostly) of cheap scares; part of it is because the dude doesn’t have expendables in his films and so he’s generally nice to his characters; part of it is because he WANTS to show us what’s going on, and a big part of horror is the unseen.  So this clashed a little bit with the American desires of the monster movie, making ‘Mimic’ a fairly plodding and unscary affair that flirts with being fascinating thanks to some cool ideas… and moments of del Toro charm winking at us from the screen.  Mira Sorvino is the bug lady, who assisted New York in killing off an epidemic by introducing a genetically altered sterile cockroach into the mix that would take over and die out.  It’s an effective intro to get us used to seeing bugs, to Mira’s curiosity-driven character, and to soft-spoken hubby Jeremy Northam, a CDC guy who never quite seems to know much about anything except to quarantine and collect stuff.  Flash forward three years… and… something something.  The main trouble starts with this flash forward, because we go quickly from virus to cure to… here’s a glimpse of our creeper.  Sure, it’s shadowed, but it also A. has the shadowed profile of a human and B. is very clearly a clicky monster thing and we’ve been talking about cockroaches so…  Right.  You know what the monster is and there’s no build to it.  Del Toro defeats any sense of tension by showing the thing out and about constantly, so that when there is a plot revelation regarding how the creature probably evolved, it’s met with a feeling of ‘…and?’  The light science backing sets the flick apart from the more mystical horror entries in Toro’s career, and hints at what he would try to accomplish with The Strain, grounding it, but though this is in part what makes the movie tolerable and not just monster trash, it further causes a remove – with The Strain, vampires are thinking creatures, but the roaches are just bugs.  There’s not an alien queen, they’re not raptors smartly plotting our demise.  They can look like us, but they’re still bugs.  Just bugs, and not very scary.

The flick’s look is also inconsistent.  Whether due to studio desires (not wanting the classic man-sized monster film) or first bigger budget American go-around, even with the ‘director’s cut’ released, for every del Toro setup there are countless predictable ‘functional’ shots that only add to the runtime.  ‘Mimic’ isn’t cookie-cutter, it’s just consistently bland as it tries to satisfy a few different genre needs at once.  For fans of GdT, this works as a reference point for elements he would use again in a more confident format; for monster movie fans, unless just the thought of bugs creeps you out, you’ll probably be waiting for the scares to start… until the movie ends.  (But the last set and sequence is, admittedly, pretty fun.  Alas, too little too late.)