Looks great, lacks substance

Rating: Null/10 (8 July 2014)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the next in a long line of movies given to big name actors and/or producers, where the production values and all the technical aspects are great because they have enough pull and capital to hire the best people, but where not enough thought is given to the story to make it the best one possible.
The film starts out slow and abysmal. Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) is a complete harebrained idiot with the attention span of a sleepy squirrel and the tendency to wander off into his own little fantasy worlds. You can see that the film makers were going for the sympathetic everyday awkward guy, but the end result is so out of the norm, so shared sense of shame inducing and so bizarrely out of it that you cannot really get behind him. Sure you feel bad when he's picked on, but he's such a weird guy that you sort of get the sense that the pickers don't do it out of malice, rather they're just as baffled by him as you are.
It gets better, fortunately. As soon as Mitty sets out on his journey the film gets much more interesting, his character loses much of the unbearable spaciness and the film's budget really starts to show. You'll get the world-scoping adventure you've seen in the trailers, you just have to wait for it. And it's not a bad adventure. Multiple locations, all breathtakingly beautiful, some good character moments, good conversation, some action, close situations, even closer calls and as a whole it's a lot of fun.
I think this film's biggest problem is that it was marketed as the next Forrest Gump. It's not. It doesn't even try to be. It has some of the same themes, and I suppose the main characters can be labeled similarly if one is so inclined, but it is its own creation. If you're going in expecting to see a warmhearted social commentary/adventure comedy featuring a simple soul in the main role, you're going to be disappointed. It is a warmhearted adventure comedy, but that's where the similarities end.
This film has its problems. The beginning is not very good, the characters get better towards the end, but they start out pretty boring and even the timeline is too tight for the plot to make much sense given that the main idea of this film is for the main character to travel and see the world. But it has some gorgeous imagery, it DOES get better towards the end and it has a good message. It evens out to an average score.