The Secret Life of Walter Mitty 2013
This is another movie I was able to get at Dollar Tree. Not a movie I would buy because the ratings were not very good, but for a dollar, it seemed like an okay risk. It only got a 51% at Rotten Tomatoes, but the National Board of Review named it one of the ten best movies of the year. Since it also came with a digital copy, I decided to watch it on the train on the way to work over several days. I think it would have been better to watch on a regular screen since it is a very wide movie and there are some great outdoor landscape scenes.
At first the movie seemed kind of derivative as Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty imagines things that play out as if they are real life. This has been done quite a bit already, but fortunately doesn’t last that long. He has a humdrum life, but is too timid to do anything outside his very small comfort zone. He meets a girl at work (set in New York City, of course he works at a magazine, this time a dying Life magazine where he manages the film archive) played by Kristen Wiig and this inspires him to take a few chances, plus he has lost an important film negative and must travel to find it. So for a while it seemed like Ben Stiller found a way to get a studio to send him on a tour of rugged but gorgeous spots throughout the world, and some of that is nice actually. It isn’t a bad story, but you find yourself waiting for key points that you know are coming since the movie is pretty much by the numbers. And as you wait for those points, the film seems pretty slow. Ultimately the payoffs aren’t that amazing after so much buildup. So the whole movie is kind of underwhelming. Wiig’s character isn’t really fleshed out, so it is pretty much just Stiller on a long trip, though he meets some colorful characters along the way including characters played by Shirley MacLaine and Sean Penn. It is enjoyable enough and sometimes pretty to look at. Honestly not a bad movie at all, just not all that good. While it doesn’t rely much on humor, that means there aren’t a lot of stale jokes either, which is welcome.
Written: 08 Nov 2018
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital