For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
Mirror Mirror is an odd concoction. It offers nothing particularly new or refreshing in the depiction of fairy tales brought the big screen yet despite this the film remains benign fun for most of its running time due to its overall feeling of friendly goodwill.
The story is basically what you already know about Snow White. Julia Roberts is the dark hearted woman who marries the King. When the King dies, the new Queen takes over and rules the land with an iron grip, taxing her subjects to the point of poverty, then taxing them some more. Snow White, the King’s daughter, is kept captive within the castle until the evil Queen, now jealous of Snow White’s good looks, banishes the young woman to the woods where she will surely be killed.
What follows is what you expect, Snow White ventures deep into the woods and meets the seven dwarves, only in this tale none of them are diamond miners and no one whistles while they work; these dwarves are snarky thieves, robbing from the rich and keeping it for themselves, that is until Snow White comes along and convinces them to continue robbing from the rich but give back the golden coins to the poor, which is where the money came from in the first place.
The one thing that stands out in Mirror Mirror is how good the film looks. The colorful, panoramic view of the kingdom is eye-catching, a mixture of computer imagery with real people integrated into the scene. It truly makes the fairy tale setting come alive. Having said that, it might have looked even better and maybe grander in scale had director Tarsem Singh chosen to shoot his film wide screen, but he chose the standard, smaller frame which somehow makes the film look surprisingly smaller.
There is a lot of friendly humor throughout, the kind you recognize as lightly amusing but not enough to actually make you laugh. When Julia Roberts narrates the introduction, telling us the history of the King and his kingdom, she throws in a couple of remarks that illustrate how the humor is going to be throughout the film. When she tells of the birth of Snow White she explains that all the people of the land celebrated by singing and dancing in the streets all day and all night, then she adds… “Obviously, no one had jobs back then.” It’s a funny aside, but not a laugh out loud remark, and neither is anything else that follows.
Julia Roberts looks as if she’s having fun portraying a comic-book version of evil, but the centre of attention is Lily Collins – daughter of Genesis drummer and latter day front man Phil Collins – who with her long, raven hair, thick black eye brows and pale skin actually looks like the human embodiment of an animated character. She is a picture perfect Snow White and holds her own while sharing scenes with either Roberts or the broad comedic style of
Because of its look and its PG family friendly approach – the absence of those occasional knowing adult nods makes this fairy tale setting almost as pure as Snow White herself – the film might have benefited more from a Christmas release and positioned as a holiday movie instead of appearing at the beginning of April, but an out-of-season release may be due to the fact that a second Snow White film will soon be hitting the screens later this year and Relativity Media wanted Julia Roberts out there first.
