Pointless Journey

Rating: Null/10 (18 February 2014)

When I heard this movie was coming out and seeing a trailer of it I thought it looked like a really fun movie. I heard it was based on a short story by James Thurber, so I sought it out and listened to an audio version narrated by Ben Stiller. The story was really short, only ten minutes, about a guy with a dull life who escapes in daydreams that are so dramatic they are silly. I thought, is a ten minute story really enough to fill an entire movie. That is the main problem with the movie. They took a ten minute story and stretched it to... twenty minutes, and then they had to fill the rest of the time with something.
The movie does well enough with the daydream sequences and capturing the boredom of life in an office. The daydreams are too heavy on special effects though, but they are entertaining. I would rather they had saved their money on the effects and prolonged those kinds of escapes, since that is all that works in the movie.
The biggest problem with the movie is the convoluted and pointless reasoning for Mitty's journey. What is it that causes Mitty to live life and explore the world? He is looking for a photograph. That's it. A photograph was mailed to him and one of the slides was missing and his job is to process the photograph. But why is one photograph so important we ask? In a contrived manner the film explains the photo is incredibly important because it is meant to be the final cover of Life magazine which is ending it's publishing and restarting online only. It seems unlikely that after twenty years on the job of never losing a photo Mitty would loose one now, which is called by the arrogant photographer: "The quintessence of Life." If I was Walter I would simply say to the boss that it wasn't my fault, but the photographers' fault for being careless and I would be in the right, upon which the boss, who is a jerk would reply: "You can say that on your next job interview," upon which I would rejoinder "up yours I will do that." But why not just contact the photographer with a letter or phone call, tell him he screwed up and lost the photo. In the most tiresome manner the movie explains this jerk has no phone, no mailing address, no way to contact him, and he is out in the middle of nowhere. Well f--- him you might say. But Walter Mitty, maybe wishing to impress the love interest, decides to go on a world spanning journey to find one photograph.
Maybe a better way for the story to go would be to have Walter laid off by Life, and then he snaps, and decides to get a job that involves world travel, and finally living a more exciting life.
Walter's search for the photographer takes him to Greenland, where he meets a very drunken and unruly man, who informs Walter that he is a helicopter pilot and he is the only one who can take Walter where he can Possibly find who he is looking for. Walter thinks for a minute that this is not a good idea to ride a helicopter into a storm with a seriously drunken man. Then, in one of his fits of daydream he is inspired to say "screw it I'm going to live life." He gets in the copter and then ends up plunging in the water and nearly gets eaten by sharks. He seems to think this experience is positive because he is finally living life, even though he nearly had his limbs torn off. Similarly later he travels to a place with an erupting volcano, because what traveler hasn't, and that adds to his excitement. It's like the real life scenes are like daydreams and not believable. Is reckless behavior that nearly leads to disaster a sign of personal growth that is inspiring and something to be used to impress the love interest.
As he goes on his journey he passes through very beautiful scenery, and you have to think it is so strange that this one photograph could be worth more than the millions of dollars that went into filming all this. Why couldn't he have brought a camera with him? Maybe he isn't a professional but how hard could it be to look at a vista of mountains and say to yourself "that is the quintessence of life," *Click* then turn in the photo to the boss who would be impressed. That would be a better ending than what we have. When we see what the elusive photograph is, it is a let down, because clearly the writer had no ideas and wrote himself in a corner.
Another thing that bothered me about this movie is it's use of product placement. At first it started out cute when he talked to a guy on the phone from Eharmony. Then this character kept recurring, until you see that Eharmony is an entire character. Likewise they include Papa John's in a strange and distracting way. The restaurant had a deep meaning for the character because he worked there when his own father, or "Papa" died, which is sad, and makes me want to eat there. Then when he is in Greenland, a country which is describes as having 100 people, he finds a Papa Johns restaurant in the middle of nowhere, and eats there, because the whole world loves Papa Johns. I was paid to say that.
I wanted to see a positive and inspiring movie. Maybe I would be more inspired if it was good. 2/10