After the highly impressive Cronos, a creative and thought-provoking vampire mindbender, Hollywood beckoned Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. However, due to one negating factor, namely a money-hungry producer, del Toro’s first American outing, Mimic, does just and only that: imitates its genre predecessors. Luckily, it does so consistently and competently but offers little, leaving the viewer steadfastly indifferent by the closing credits, inciting us to neither write home about the feature nor disgruntled enough to complain and forewarn others. Instead, we quickly forget the film in order to leave a mental vacancy for something more vital.
Throughout Manhattan, the common cockroach is found to be responsible for a rampant, fatal epidemic, dubbed Strickler’s Disease, which is plaguing the borough’s youth. The Center of Disease Control hires an entomologist, Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino), to engineer a predatory species to exterminate the insect carriers. She creates a hybrid termite/mantis, which she dubs the “Judas Breed,” a sterile insect with a lifespan of approximately four to six months. After releasing the new species, the plight quickly disappears. Three years hence, the city is victim to a series of vicious murders which lead to a giant insect species living underground that has acquired the ability to mimic humans, thus accounting for its high success rate at not only stalking its prey, but remaining virtually undetected.
Mimic is competent and consistent at all times, yet never challenging, as it happily proceeds along, just as it should, while checking off all of the prerequisites that make a solid horror effort: Icky creatures swathed in darkness for most of the film which, when light is permitted to descent upon them, we are only permitted brief snippets of partial images as we are stuck in a claustrophobia setting, etc., etc. It is as if del Toro used Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror as an instruction manual more than a meditative study. In this regard the film is its own namesake for it mimics all solid sci-fi horror works which came before but offers nothing which we haven’t seen a hundred times over.
Indeed, the film goes get a thumbs up when the epiphany is revealed of how the antagonists have gone undetected for so long but the positive note counterbalances the negative mark the film received in its early stages when it lapsed into heavy-handed didacticism while serving a very healthy helping of foreshadowing. Again, we’re back at even.
Honestly, there is little else of note regarding Guillermo del Toro’s American debut. Granted, the complacent nature of Mimic is a head-scratcher for those who have seen the director’s masterful Cronos, but I have a theory upon what might have occurred: Harvey Weinstein, serving as resident dictator, a.k.a. executive producer, fearful that a young creative (foreign?) mind might get a bit crazy with his brand-spanking new Hollywood budget, negated and forced each and every creative impulse del Toro had during the production of the film to assure himself that he’d have a sellable product at the end of the day. Case in point, Frankenstein is mentioned at one point as we are given a plot where the underbelly of a microcosm could easily be conveyed as a metaphor for what lies above. Does the film expand upon either of these concepts? Of course not. Instead, it plays it safe which, for anyone familiar with del Toro and Weinstein, we can be given three guesses with the first two not counting, at why we are left with a flat film. Wisely del Toro never worked with Weinstein again.
Conversation piece: Robert Rodriguez served as Second Unit Director.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
