2013 movie
Rating: 12/20
Plot: Walter Mitty works with pictures for Life, a magazine facing its last issue as it transitions into a more tech-friendly entity. He's got a love interest, of course, who barely knows he exists. Problems arise with his new boss, a guy with a beard, when Mitty can't find the negative for the cover of the final issue. Oh, shoot! I almost forgot to mention that he's got a problem with daydreaming, daydreaming so hard that he actually sort of blacks out. Anyway, he is forced to become a globetrotter in order to find the photographer.
This has nothing to do with the James Thurber short story except for borrowing the name of the titular character and making him a guy who daydreams. That doesn't bother me at all, but it's odd. Why didn't they just go with a different title and let people figure out on their own that they borrowed the concept from the Thurber story? I really wanted to like this movie, at least as much as I want to watch other things Ben Stiller is involved with. This went through a lot of actors and directors and probably countless rewrites, but it feels very much like Stiller's baby. He directed the thing, and the guy's got vision and ambition. Unfortunately, this is really kind of a mess. It's not funny, it's not very exciting, and it's a little too obvious thematically. The romance subplot with Kristen Wiig seems superfluous although I do kind of like her, and the daydreams, very different from the more satirical stuff in the Thurber story, don't really do much of anything. I guess they're supposed to be funny, but none of them are. And you'd think special effects in a daydream would be a lot better than this. A falling Ben Stiller, a big fight scene in an elevator and then in the streets, and a weird Benjamin Button thing look pretty terrible. When Walter Mitty is about to be Pompeii'd in Iceland or climbing mountains, however, things look pretty good. Sean Penn's in it briefly, and his part was my favorite part of the whole thing. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was a CGI Sean Penn, and if it was, it looked pretty good. This movie's got ideas galore, but it really could have used a trim in a lot of areas and more development in others. I didn't need to see Ben Stiller skateboarding for ten minutes, for example, and if you really think about it, the daydreams probably don't even need to exist. I really thought the modernization stuff--the magazine dying and being replaced with something more digital and cold--was going to be explored thematically more, but it wasn't. It felt like a loose end, an excuse to have the character run around the world. When we do get to see the final magazine cover, it's a bit of a let-down, too. The movie is wildly sloppy but also wildly predictable although it's breezy enough and kind of fun in places. It goes a lot of places, but it doesn't really manage to go anywhere. Mark my words though--Ben Stiller has an excellent movie in him.
No comments:
Post a Comment