Don't dream, it's over.

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2017)

I loved the original Golden Age Mitty movie starring Danny Kaye, but really apart from retaining the title and being about a guy who daydreams a lot, this Ben Stiller directed and starring vehicle has nothing to do with it. That said, Stiller for me has the right degree of little-boy-lost meets downtrodden-little-guy pathos to just about make it work as a very convoluted plot unfolds. This Walter is a long-serving back-room, basement-floor worker at "Life" magazine charged with processing photographs for publication and in particular those of the magazine's legendary yet elusive star photographer Sean O'Connell. Even though the magazine is closing down its print version to go on-line making most of the staff redundant, its dropped-in nerdy transition boss, played by Adam Scott wants to end up on a high with a big splashy cover and when O'Connell sends in a special picture (it's not that great actually), the decision is made to hold the front page for this one shot. Only thing is, Walter and his long-time co-worker can't find the darn thing which sets our hero on an impulsive quest to track down O'Connell incidentally taking him to Greenland, Iceland and eventually the Himalayas where at last he catches up with the enigmatic snapper.
Along the way, we also meet his dotty sister and widowed mother as they help the latter move home where much is made of her late husband's piano and also watch as his budding romance with single parent Kristen Wiig blossoms as he daydreams her into his life. Personally I could have done without the forced, clichéd humour over his family particularly as Shirley MacLaine plays her part more like his grandmother but Wiig is very watchable as the winsome object of his affection with a love for early David Bowie, references to whose "Space Oddity" hit become something of a running gag in the film.
Forgetting about the over-thin and too-fantastic plot, it's hard not to be impressed by the flashy dream-sequences, especially the very first one where Walter executes a flying leap Jason Bourne would be proud of to save his fellow workers from their building on fire. The problem is though that the dreams are too big. Nobody has C-Gen dreams like this and they seem too much like excuses to insert eye-catching SFX sequences. There were subtler, better directorial touches though, like when a flock of birds forms Wiig's face and a subliminal message from his work-mate appears on a hillside but other ideas like Walter's skateboard trip around Iceland and especially a weirdly unfunny reference to "Benjamin Button" seem over-contrived. That said, the cinematography of the Greenlandic and Icelandic locations is very well done with lots of panoramic eye-catching shots.
Like I said, I liked Stiller and Wiig in their parts while Walter's interaction with bearded weirdy Scott is also good for some laughs but the celebrity cameos of MacLaine and Sean Penn as O'Connell didn't add anything to the film, for me.
On the whole I found the movie patchy and a bit too slight and kooky to really hang together, likewise the mix and match soundtrack of 60's, 80's and contemporary music in the background. It would have been nice if someone had thought to reference the original movie even once by way of tribute and what happened to the phonetic links into Walter's dreams which in the original made you at least know exactly when our hero was actually dreaming. As it is, I'll stick with Kaye's Mitty over this slightly hit and miss remake.