[5.8/10] When I think of director Guillermo del Toro, the last word that comes to mind is “generic.” He has such a distinctive style, one that reveals the humanity of his subjects and which brings a visual excellence to help convey it. Even as he trafficks so often in the fantastical, he also never ceases to make the events of his movies seem emotionally real.

Except here. Mimic plays like any other 1990s blockbuster. Sure, if you squint, you can find a few of del Toro’s trademarks, but so much of his distinctive fingerprints seem lacking. It’s easy, in 2020, to blame producer and walking garbage stain Harvey Weinstein, who reportedly clashed with del Toro behind the scenes, for that problem. But whatever the reason, this movie takes a director with a distinctive style and reduces it to just another studio picture like any other of its time.

The one area that feels unique and distinctive is in the production design/prosthetics work on the bugs at the center of the film. The design of them is gross, but also vivid, full of jumbled up organs, half-remembered exoskeleton images of the human form, and creepy in their innards and their movements. The props and puppetry at play are outstanding, creating a visceral, goo-drenched set of antagonists for our heroes to engage, dissect, and flee.

The catch is that the same “Judas” insects are also rendered in unconvincing 1990s CGI. It’s unfair to slate Mimic for that. The effects are fine for their time. But particularly compared to the stellar work done on the tangible versions of these creatures, their computer-generated equivalents stand out like a sore thumb and feel almost chuckle-worthy.

But that much would be eminently forgivable if there were more to like otherwise in this movie. The characters are almost uniformly flat and uninvolving, save for Leonard, the punchy MTA agent. He’s the only personality in this movie who feels alive, reacting to these events the way a human being would, injecting some humor here and there, and above all else, conveying a sense of relatability here. He is far and away the highlight among a list of talented performers.

They’re all more or less wasted here, reduced to broad archetypes and soot-stained screams. Whether it’s the curious entomologist, her playful CDC representative husband, his bland assistant, the friendly shoe-shiner, each is more a piece that del Toro and company can move around the board than anybody with a rich inner life. The worst offender here is the poor developmentally disabled kid, who is depicted in a cartoony, tic-filled fashion that feels borderline offensive.

Those characters don’t really have meaningful arcs, which all but dooms a movie that doesn’t have much in the way of momentum. The major players in Mimic have a goal here -- stop the “breeding male” of the Judas bug colony so the killer insects can no longer reproduce -- but there’s not much of a story. Our heroes look for the bugs. They get stuck in the subway. They find the bugs. They run from the bugs. They kill the bugs. The end.

I’m being a little tongue in cheek there, and a high enough level of generality you can reduce any film to that sort of punch list, but there’s not really a sense of cause and effect here, or choices early in the film that motivate events that come later. Maybe that’s inevitable in a creature feature, where it’s the monsters who are making choices and the survivors have to react to them. Even so, too often Mimic plays like a bundle of random occurrences rather than a complete story.

The one exception to that rule is the central choice at the beginning of the film. When we meet our protagonist, Dr. Susan Tyler, she’s successfully stopped a pandemic affecting children throughout New York City by genetically engineering a bug that kills the cockroaches who were carrying the disease. It solves one grievous problem, but through the law of unintended consequences, creates the species of man-sized insects that threaten to literally consume humanity if gone unchecked.

There’s an interesting idea at play there. What happens when an emergency situation requires taking chances with unknown consequences, only to have to face those consequences down the line? Along the way, Mimic also flirts with notions of community and societal ambivalence, contrasting and comparing the way the bugs interact with one another versus the way the human “colony” operates. Our heroes only succeed when they cooperate and look out for one another, in contrast from a certain self-interested and callous “not my problem” attitude that otherwise permeates the city the film depicts.

Unfortunately, these suffer as undeveloped ideas under a waterfall of generic nineties action beats. Mimic has the requisite number of gruesome kills, and shadowy shots of scary critters emerging out of the dark, and scientists who apparently have better train-dodging reflexes that flitting, multi-limbed superbugs. But it doesn’t have much beyond that. It’s a surface-level film, packing too many random threads that go untied and too many random characters who serve no purpose into an ungainly, albeit standard issue dose of studio horror.

That’s not what I hope for when I cue up a film directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro. There’s not the kind of lived-in relationships, believable emotions, and almost transgressive appreciation for the bizarre and unusual here. In moments, you can see wisps of those things, in the relationship between the shoe-shiner and his young ward, or Leonard’s reactions to the insane happenings around him, or the combined terror and appreciation the scientists have for bugs which have evolved to copy the human form within a twisted biological funhouse mirror.

But so many of these elements are rendered inert by the standard coat of studio paint applied to anything and everything. If I didn’t know going in, I would be almost shocked to learn that this was a del Toro picture, since it plays like the work of a long-suffering studio hired hand. At times, you can see pieces of the incomparable director’s signature style, but too often they’re buried within the expectations for a Miramax picture meant for general audiences. Give me more of the strange and the human, and less of the standard and expected. Thankfully, in the years following Mimic, del Toro would.