The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is directed by and stars Ben Stiller. Walter Mitty (Stiller) leads a dull life. He doesn't know how to fill out his eharmony profile. He has spent the last 16 years dealing with photographs for LIFE magazine. For the last issue, the executives, led by some dick (Adam Scott), want to use a photo of Sean O' Connell's (Sean Penn) that was not delivered to Mitty's department. He decides to track down the nomadic O'Connell and find the missing photo to begin enjoying his life, stop daydreaming, and impress his office crush (Kristen Wiig).

Anything you liked about the trailers for this movie were mostly in the first 30-40 minutes. Outside of the jokes that everyone has seen, not a lot of them actually land. Most of them just come off as normal conversation. I'd chalk it up to bad comedic timing.

This movie is so predictable, everyone might have thought of the ending 10 minutes in. You're never really sure until it's revealed. The ending of every scene is as predictable as a coin with two heads. 

Mitty has a bad habit of daydreaming or "zoning out". It's interesting the first time (the one from the trailer), but after a while it jiust gets annoying. A couple of them just felt cartoonish and stupid. Kristen Wiig is placed throughout the film in these dreams as a reminder for why he's taking this journey but it feels really forced.

The character of Mitty would be more relatable if instead of zoning out during every confrontation, he either stood up for himself or backed down. Doing one or the other is more interesting than something we immediately know isn't really happening.

Adam Scott has gotten used to playing a complete douchebag on screen outside of Parks & Recreation. He seems comfortable in his role, but everyone outside of Ben Stiller and Sean Penn seem to be half-assing this movie. Patton Oswalt is literally phoning it in as the eharmony IT guy.

Kristen Wiig could be replaced by any other female actress. She isn't useless, but there's nothing unique about this role of Cheryl that puts Wiig above anyone else.

Sean Penn has a small role, but it's very different from what we've seen him in before. He used to being an over-the-top temperamental character. But in here he's calm, philosophical, almost inspiring, but his small amount of screen time isn't enough to turn this movie around.

This movie has been in planning for the better part of 2 decades. It feels like Stiller had this thrown into his lap, and he decided to try and make some kind of breakthrough out of it. While the cinematography is beautiful, it felt like some tourist advertisements for Greenland and Iceland. Its editing feels pretentious. The terrific music and beautiful landscape shots may be cool, but it makes it look like the movie is trying to be inspiring, without pulling it off.

Walter has this sister (Kathryn Hahn) who seems to serve no purpose at all. She doesn't even advance the plot in a way that another character couldn't. She must be there for comic relief, but EVERYONE is there for comic relief, so she just felt completely pointless.

Because of Stiller's comedic roots, the film simply can't be taken seriously as a drama. And since it's written and marketed as a comedy, but pretends to be this coming-of-age epic, the audience will walk out feeling neutral towards the film as a whole. It's perfectly bearable, but the life of Walter Mitty isn't as secret as they'd like us to think.

Rating: C