Romcom, travelogue or skateboarding flick?

Rating: 1/10 (15 January 2014)

Walter Mitty, the nerd with a strong fantasy life. Ben Stiller has a fantasy life as a classic film director. This nerd chases a missing photo negative (google it) across the North Atlantic and Middle East only to find he had it all along, and his mother saves it from the trash. Ben Stiller's film lurches from genre to genre. One minute it's hyper-CGI superhero, next it's Greenland/Iceland/Afghanistan travelogue, then it's a divorcée romantic comedy. Oh, and not to forget the junior employee who gives venture capitalism back its humanity. And grows a beard, just like the bad guys.
In this version of the James Thurber (google that, too) story, Walter is also an ex-punk ace skateboarder, which allows him not only to connect with his single-mother love interest, but also to pursue Sean Penn across Iceland.
TSLOWM isn't bad, but it's strange. Its heart is in the right place, but the script is overambitious, trying to accommodate CGI, world travel, finance-free romance and the 'quintessence of life' on a pretty flimsy premise. See 'Billy Liar' for a better treatment of that.