WARNING: This Review May Contain Spoilers
I feel like I may have mentioned this before, but it is always harder to write articles about films that are based on books as I guess technically they are new adaptations of the written story instead of being remakes of the original film.
Art of Comedy
This is one of the many highlights of the original film in my opinion. Yes, the film has a serious undertone and I’ll come to that a little later but it also has its lighter moments. To make it even better, the comedy in this film is played completely straight by Danny Kaye and even though there are certain parts that you will see coming, I promise it will still make you laugh. On the other hand, I know that it is Ben Stiller’s niche for his comedy characters to, as I mentioned, play the comedy straight but there was something about this film that made those moments seem forced.
Over exaggeration
This is actually one of the things that annoyed me about the remake. What I like about the daydream scenes in the original film is that they come across as mini stories of their own within the main plot of the film. However, in the remake they are more like these tiny little titbits that don’t really make much sense and are over exaggerated. Look at the scene where Walter fights the new boss; there’s no clear trigger and it turns into a fight that in my opinion wouldn’t look out place in an episode of Family Guy.
Lack of Obvious Transition
Now, what I mean by this isn’t the fact that you can’t tell what parts are daydreams and which parts are real – that’s made pretty obvious at times by the above. However, in the original film there are triggers for each of Walter’s daydreams instead of them just randomly happening. For example, when Walter imagines himself as a cowboy saving Rosalind’s life – it is triggered by seeing the cowboy on the horse while he’s driving. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen in the remake because it does, but only once near the beginning. Towards the end it started to become more confusing about what is real and what isn’t.
Overall Storyline
Here’s the bit that I promised to get to later and now it’s later. I don’t understand what the plot of the remake is. Part of me feels like it is supposed to be this spiritual, ‘finding yourself’ style of story, with a touch of ‘will he get the girl?’ thrown in. For me it feels completely ‘Walter-centric’ whereas the original has a much broader storyline of mystery and intriguing with, as I already mentioned, a smattering of comedy. Yes, in the end they both get the girl (or so it seems in the remake) but there’s more real world development to the relationship between Rosalind and Walter than there is between Walter and Cheryl.
In Conclusion
In case it wasn’t completely obvious from the previous comments, I prefer the original film of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty than the remake. As always I recommend for you to watch both films and make your own opinions and this isn’t saying I have anything against Ben Stiller as an actor because I really don’t – but as a director it is a different story. Thinking about it this maybe the cause of the remake being, as mentioned, ‘Walter-centric’ and I think that was a bad move.
