"Make one."

The Stepford Wives (2004): 3/10

Poster (c) Paramount Pictures

Usually I have no problems with remakes if they're done successfully. Of course, that didn't authorize Gus Van Sant's Psycho, but that's beside the point. Frank Oz (who many recognize as the voice of Yoda and Miss Piggy from the Muppets, among others), already had one successful remake under his belt (the enjoyable Little Shop of Horrors), but needed more. So he decided to remake an obscure 1975 thriller about a town that's too perfect, The Stepford Wives. And now I think I'm on the bandwagon on saying that all of these remakes need to be stopped NOW.

Joanna (Nicole Kidman, badly masking her accent yet again) is a successful TV person (executive? president? I don't remember), but after there's an assassination attempt on her (during a 15 minute overview of the new season-comeletely unnecessary [except for a 'pun' later]), she's fired. She and her less successful husband Walter (Matthew Broderick, who seems to be underused lately) move with their two kids to Stepford, Connecticut, where it seems like everyone's stuck in the 1950's. But something's not right, as Joanna senses, and tries to discover what it is, while Walter gets dragged into the chauvinistic society that the Stepford husbands share. Random characters (including that ubiquitous Christopher Walken) ensue.

I could reiterate what every reviewer has been saying. I could say how this attempt at comedy, drama, and horror tries to be all three and fails at all three-which it does, completely. It falls over on its padded-runtime face many times whenever it tries to be one of the three. When it tries to be funny, it just isn't: you can flush the toilets from a control panel by the front door. Now isn't that hilarious? And when Walter has to choose between Joanna and a "perfect" wife (you'll understand if you see the movie...but you really shouldn't see it), the drama's supposed to be running high up. DUH! What do you think's gonna happen? And the whole concept (which might have been scary in the 1975 version, I didn't see it) just isn't scary. All of these problems don't lie in Oz (it seems like he's doing a bit of struggling for work), but in Paul Rudnick's screenplay. He tries to squeeze so much into it that it just doesn't work. Any of the plot "twists" that come about can be seen basically during the opening credits. Well, not the "final" twist, but that's too stupid to even mention.

Characters run to and fro without an iota of development (Jon Lovitz was in the movie?) and pop in just to say "funny" things or to help the "plot" along. But that's not even the worst of it. In every single scene-no exaggeration-there is either a boom mike or part of the camera in frame. I can forgive one or two-those things are pretty hard to avoid-but Stepford is such a slipshod, one-hand-tied-behind-your-back movie that they just don't care about making something that's technically well done. The only thing well done about this movie is Roger Bart as one of Stepford's only two gay men (such a stretch from his role as Carmen Ghia in the Broadway version of The Producers). Without his small character, the movie would be laughless, every character uninteresting, and, well, the movie would still be awful. Basically, stay away from The Stepford Wives.

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, thematic material and language.

Review Date: June 25, 2004