Bland, insipid, artless.

Rating: 2/10 (3 November 2014)

Among other problems with this movie, is the plain fact that Ben Stiller's Walter Mitty possesses no character appeal. He's a cipher, and in being played as such evokes, for me, little in the way of empathy or, worse, interest. If he loses his job at Life magazine or gets the girl is of no account, whatsoever. The proxy for this dullard's boring existence is his vivid fantasy life, wherein the mild-mannered Mitty transforms himself into all manner of heroic beings. Mitty's heroics are created using all of the Hollywood slight-of-hand available, and instantly produce a kind of superhero Mitty, because of course, we can never have enough of super heroes and never enough of special effects. These manufactured effects do little to compensate for the story, which is still quite a bore, and is built around the flimsiest of plot. The fact that his fantasy world is created using various sort of computer generated gimmicks makes Mitty less interesting, not more because there's no real person there. He becomes even more remote and one-dimensional as a character. When Mitty later breaks out of his shell, and goes on his pilgrimage to recover the lost film slide, he becomes a completely different human being - heroic in a different, and if less computer animated way, still no more plausible. There's no transformation of character, no nuance whatsoever in how the meek and timid Mitty suddenly becomes a kind of Bear Grillis, and the leap of faith is simply too much to accept. Worse even, Stiller doesn't even try to play to that. Stiller plays Stiller the action figure, making the whole abbreviated excercise of super-hero fantasy excess turned survival adventurer a hackneyed excercise in clumsy and unrealistic story-telling. I can forgive a plot that's slender and fare that's light-hearted at best, but the utter artlessness of this film makes it one to avoid.