Лексический анализ англоязычных кинорецензий

Ben Stiller, who chaperoned this movie out of development hell and all the way to the big screen, has the perfect "everyman" quality to play Walter. The only other big-name actor I could see in this role is Tom Hanks from about a decade ago. Kristen Wiig tones down some of her more annoying comedic mannerisms to present an attractive and appealing Cheryl. <…>. They're cute.

<…>. In fact, as the film moves toward its climax, he vanishes from the story. It's an odd choice and I'm not sure it works.

The word "old fashioned" can be used to describe The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; unfortunately, that's not necessarily the kind of description that will translate into box office success. This is a moderately enjoyable but largely forgettable confection. It's being marketed as a family film but young children with short attention spans will probably be bored. Stiller deserves credit for remaining true to the spirit of the original; unfortunately, he fails to recapture the magic and that makes the 2013 iteration of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty only fitfully satisfying.

The New York Times (A.O. Scott)

<…>. Workplace bullies might make fun of him, mocking his nerdy clothes and self-effacing manner, but from the start this Walter is, for the audience, a magnet for our sympathy. Not Thurber’s feckless Everyman or Kaye’s holy fool, but a sad, decent guy in need of protection and love.

Walter’s wild bouts of invention — he pictures himself leaping through the window of a burning building, tearing through the streets of Manhattan on a wild action-movie chase and doing other superhero-type stuff — represent some of the adventure he has sacrificed in a life of duty and drudgery. Employed in the photography department at Life magazine, he has a crush on a co-worker named Cheryl (Kristen Wiig, with her natural silliness in check and an adorable habit of crinkling up her nose) and a big problem with the new bosses, a squad of bearded, skinny-suited tech jerks led by Adam Scott.

A relic of the analog world, Walter is in danger of being downsized out of a job as the magazine prepares its final print edition. <…>. Following cryptic clues (which Cheryl helps him decode), he travels to Iceland, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, and the movie becomes a lavish, surreal travelogue, blending digital effects with stunning landscape montages.

It also, somewhat more riskily, tries to fold the kind of playful, wide-eyed high spirits familiar from the “Night at the Museum” movies into what is in effect a midlife melodrama. <…>. Walter is a low-key suitor, and Cheryl is drawn to him for his thoughtfulness and quiet sense of humor rather than for the alpha-male derring-do he secretly possesses. In one funny, poignant scene, he executes a series of impressive skateboard moves — real, not imaginary — while her back is turned. But showing off like that would be out of character in any case.

Or maybe not entirely. Though it is a celebration of modesty, there is also quite a lot of vanity in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” (And quite a lot of corporate propaganda too, for Papa John’s Pizza, Cinnabon and eHarmony, the online dating site represented by the irreverent, just-a-regular-guy-like-you presence of Patton Oswalt.) Mr. Stiller (working from a screenplay by Steven Conrad) is not content to be the hero of the story; he turns Walter into an almost-martyr and a would-be saint, a mystical self-help guru whose journey of self-discovery makes him better than everyone else, though of course he is too enlightened to say so.

<…>.

Екатеринбург, 2014