Ultra-modern reworking of Ira Levin's 1972 bestseller (and the 1975 film-counterpart starring Katharine Ross) about a Connecticut suburb filled with perky, beautiful housewives and their boorish, piggy husbands. Nicole Kidman is very good as the newcomer in town whose husband (a rather stolid Matthew Broderick) immediately joins the Men's Association. Abandoning the sly dark humor of the original movie, this rather bombastic version (and brief at just 92 minutes) shows heavy signs of post-production tinkering. There are all sorts of things wrong with this picture, starting with the hedging-of-bets pertaining to the mystery behind the wives (which might've been wildly successful if the filmmakers had stuck to their original vision). Kidman's children disappear at camp, are brought home (off-camera), and then disappear again; a Stepford bunny coughs up money like an ATM machine (which fails to jibe with Men's Association honcho Christopher Walken's "home movie" explanation near the finish); while an outlandish twist near the finale leads to a teeth-grinding tag featuring a Larry King cameo that calls into question director Frank Oz's competence behind the camera. The opening 30-minutes are decent, but the thicker the plot gets the more ridiculous the movie becomes. Screenwriter Paul Rudnick stayed mum on this disaster, but Oz has since said he didn't follow his instincts and allowed producers to dictate his decisions (one of them being the ending, which was reshot after test audiences nixed the first cut). Lots of promise here for a terrific satire, now a chapter in the filmmaker's handbook on how not to remake a success. *1/2 from ****
Review of The Stepford Wives
