…doesn’t have the lightness of touch you associate with a whimsical Wes Anderson picture. It does have a few cheeky moments – like one in which Mitty shows off some killer skateboarding moves, that Cheryl unfortunately misses – but not enough to make it a genuinely enjoyable watch. In the end it comes off as an indulgent vanity project for a misguided star who thinks two hours of his adventure-holiday videos would make for charming cinema viewing.

There’s nothing that comes as a surprise in Walter Mitty, least of all the tiresomely predictable daydreams he goes into as the film opens. And his discovery of his true self happens with too few wrinkles, and with too unlikely a hinge, to make an impression.

Visually brilliant, the film fails and turns out to be complex and heavy at times when all it needs to do is actually lighten up and have some fun!

The film is very well shot and has a tricky screenplay. The problem though is that Stiller doesn’t transport smoothly from real life to fantasy, making it slow and boring.

It takes a while to figure out the direction in which the film is going. But once that is clear, there aren’t too many surprises left. So all you have to do is enjoy the gorgeous landscapes because there is precious little otherwise as far as the story is concerned, which takes it self a bit too seriously.

There are a couple of sequences where the film becomes completely over the top in Mitty’s daydream cutaways, if only the rest of the film were as engaging and intelligent as those two scenes.