Not really "Walter Mitty"

Rating: 4/10 (21 July 2014)

I've read the short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber where a bored suburban husband imagines a fantasy-world while waiting outside a beauty parlor for his domineering wife. It's a clever and cute story about how we are legends in our own minds, how we all think how noble & chivalrous we'd be when placed in heroic situations, etc. In the short story, we quickly figure out that it's all in this mild-mannered character's head, that none of the actions he imagines is real.
The movie "Walter Mitty" starts off in a very similar manner: a meek man imagines scenarios where he is the hero, performs valiantly in dangerous situations, then snaps out of the fantasy world and back to reality. Eventually, he finds himself in a real-life scenario where he starts behaving fearlessly to any and all dangers.
What's weird is that, in the story, we know that the Walter Mitty character is dreaming up all these wild situations. In the movie version, once he starts off on his quest, all the events are actually happening to him. Readers expect him to snap back into reality, but in the film the scenarios are really happening to him, he's *not* living this within the confines of his mind. For that, the film should have been called something like "The Secret Life of Ryan Johnson" or "Adventures in LIFE", and not titled from a very well-known work of fiction.