Ben Stiller
I sogni segreti di Walter Mitty

After months of procrastinating watching this film (blasted in full pomp by a rather unusual and intriguing advertising campaign), the day before yesterday I sprawled on the couch to enjoy the much-anticipated moment.

Unfortunately, as often happens to me, the outcome was devastating. A film that could have been clever, dynamic, and somewhat unique suddenly turned into a jumble of poorly resolved "good intentions." Weak direction, long and stretched-out timing, often focusing on the dazed face of the protagonist who certainly doesn’t have the physique du role of Tony Servillo but rather an expression (one) crossed between Mister Bean and Dumbo (due to the charter-flight ears). The photography is good, "graced" by the beautiful locations (Greenland, Finland, Africa, Tibet...) the film slips into soporific boredom and a handful of "pseudo-Zen goodness" akin to "Forrest Gump" (if you know what I mean) unraveling clichés, the myth of "one in a thousand succeeds" (so dear to the American belief), and snippets of self-motivational lessons seen and reviewed in similar films. A film full of "illogical and rational holes": can it be that someone goes around the world looking for a presumed nonexistent photo for the cover of the magazine that just fired you? Not even the creators of Monster & C would go that far. Here and there, the moments of the protagonist's "dream" save the day, making us just slightly jump from the couch (like the action-movie part of surfing on the highway with the arch-enemy, for example, or the jump from the bridge to save the puppy). For the rest, everything slowly sinks into the mediocrity of a film that promised fireworks and flames and which drags me to the end credits with difficulty, after a dull and banal ending with him—after 2 hours of hesitation and two big lies—finally pledging eternal love with the protagonist (not even the very beautiful Kristen Wiig) met on a social network like Meetic(!?). A "mediocre" film, I would say sweetish and covered with sappy and sticky sugariness that you can't get rid of even by washing your hands with Viakal.