The glass sparkles in new Julia Roberts' flick

Of all the computer-generated tricks in Mirror Mirror, the director’s effect of choice is adding an occasional animated sparkle to the actors’ white-as-snow teeth, making any smile instantly charming. It says, look at how attractive everyone is in this movie; doesn’t that matter more than what our characters are up to?

Julia Roberts and Lily Collins, as the snarky Queen and her sweet stepdaughter Snow White, respectively, try their best to distract us from the tried and true plot with their impeccably applied lipstick and gaudy golden dresses. But Mirror Mirror, a family fantasy directed by Tarsem Singh (who brought us Immortals last year), is as flashy and impractical as the Queen’s extravagant wardrobe.

An amalgam of trusted fairy tales “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” the film opens with an awkward CG prologue (meant to imitate stop-motion animation, but inhabited by strangely slimy stick figures) narrated by Roberts, who affects a dodgy British accent for the serious bits and switches to American for cynical asides. The sequence fills us in on the story so far: the beyond-beautiful Snow White and her father, the King, were the happiest family in all the land until another beautiful woman arrived to put the King under her spell. They got married, the greedy Queen kicked her husband out of his kingdom, and the rightful heir, Snow White, was left to pick cinders out of the hearth. Or at least to stay holed up in her tower and talk to the birds that fly in through the window.

Now, the Queen has sucked her royal subjects dry of money and there’s no one else she can tax. Broke, she takes her anger out on her favorite punching bags: Snow White (Snow for short) and the royal servant Brighton (Nathan Lane, whose white wig has the most spirally spiral curls I’ve ever seen). When we first meet the Queen on her throne, she’s ensconced in the folds of a gold and peach gown, like a hermit crab in a pearly shell. And this crabby queen “radiates crazy,” as one servant lets slip. Roberts’s villain-like madness might be this film’s only attraction for the parents in the audience, but it wears thin after a while.

In another out-of-place special effect, the Queen’s infamous mirror on the wall is a watery portal into another world: she asks the mirror “Who’s the fairest of them all?” and then steps into it, emerging from the sea and onto the deck of what appears to be a typical tiki hut, where her dispassionate alter-ego awaits to impart counsel. It’s a bewildering choice for making the title “mirror” more interesting, and it doesn’t encourage any more viewer sympathy for the Queen.

As Snow White, dark-haired Collins is sweet but not interesting enough to be a match for the Queen. She has none of the self-aware, “just-stepped-out-of-a-Disney-movie” charm of Amy Adams in Enchanted, nor the spunk of Rapunzel in Disney’s most recent animated venture, Tangled.

Trouble brews in the snowy kingdom when handsome Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer) passes through: both Snow and her stepmother are smitten. Snow, who first finds him in the forest shirtless and tied up by bandits (he insists they were giants – we’re introduced to them later as the seven dwarves), crashes her step-mother’s ball to ask the prince for his help to overthrow the Queen’s rule. The Queen, who doesn’t play as nicely as Snow, banishes her from the castle and slips the Prince some love potion – which turns out to be “puppy love” potion, reducing Hammer to a bouncy, panting passion for his “master.”

Hammer is charming as the Prince (his smile is the one most often enhanced with that artificial sparkle), and he deserves an A for all the scrapes and blatant attempts at physical comedy writers Jason Keller and Melisa Wallack put him through: multiple strippings of his royal shirt, a love spell gone awry, repeated punches in the face in attempts to break said spell, a masquerade-ball costume topped with bunny ears (excuse me, rabbit ears). The horrors are endless, but as with the Queen’s wicked ways, increasingly unfunny.

Snow, tossed into the forest (a scary place full of rod-straight trees and a quaint blanket of snow), finds sanctuary in the hideout of the seven dwarves. At first demoted to forced comic relief (in an early scene Prince Alcott tells them, “You’re short, and it’s funny.”), the dwarves prove the most down-to-earth characters in this outlandish movie. They’ve been banished by the townspeople because they’re “uglies.” Snow’s relationship with the dwarves, led by Martin Klebba as Butcher, evolves nicely into true friendship. She’s the Wendy to their Lost Boys.

In the woods, after one wardrobe change from riches to rags and a cool new haircut, Snow is transformed into a bandit herself. Who knew Snow White’s dwarves had such an eye for style? They teach her some snazzy sword skills and with their help Snow prepares to take back her throne and the prince.

Snow, who’s spent her childhood locked in a tower reading of princes saving damsels, raises her sword and tells the dwarves enthusiastically, “Let’s change that ending!” But is the film as radical as it thinks it is? Mirror Mirror is as fixated on physical attractiveness as the evil Queen. Like many fairy tales, the movie can’t hide its didactic overtones: mind your manners, don’t steal from the poor, don’t make fun of short people, and don’t use magic to make yourself pretty and young – instead, be as naturally beautiful and pleasant as Snow White!

This is Snow’s story, but it would’ve benefited from a deeper focus on Roberts as the Queen with serious insecurities about increasing age and waning beauty. The film covers its lack of substance with lavish sets, tacky special effects and those candy-colored costumes. When a servant helping the Queen with her beauty regimen asks, “Isn’t that a trifle excessive?” Roberts retorts, “There’s no such thing.” Actually, there is, and it’s called Mirror Mirror.