The Stepford Wives: Critic Reviews

In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution.

Frank Oz's madcap remake turns a dusty, second-rate thriller from 1975 into a loud and shiny postmodern farce.

You feel some of the strain in this immaculately shot, designed and costumed farce, but it's fast and the cast is lively.

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

An empty comedy that takes hackneyed potshots at consumerism.

Rudnick specializes in hurling poison darts. Here he throws armloads of them, and a surprising number hit the board.

It has two speeds -- obvious and more so.

Rudnick has written some of the year's sharpest comic dialogue for this threesome: Kidman, Bette Midler ... and Roger Bart.

Even its slyest and most insinuating moments are played broadly.

Often feels off, forced even.

Rudnick and director Frank Oz don't do anything radical with the original premise ... but they choose comedy over horror, and it's a wise decision.

Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension.

At its best this is a CQ (as in chuckle quietly) comedy rather than an LOL (as in laugh out loud) affair.

Oz has made an interesting -- and entertaining -- choice. Instead of updating the story to make it more credible, he has gone the other way: milking its passe alarmism for laughs.

A stylish comedic re-imagining of the '70s feminist thriller, filled with witchy wit and war-of-the-sexes stingers as well as a number of delicious performances.

It displays all the intellectual heft of a beer commercial -- light beer at that.

To paraphrase Paul Rudnick's Premiere magazine movie-critic alter ego, Libby Gelman-Waxner: It's flat, cold, fork-resistant and tasteless, if you ask me.

Audiences that find themselves laughing at first will likely be fidgeting as the pic drifts toward a peculiar if oddly predictable climax, requiring -- much like the Stepford women -- that brains be checked at the door.

Its tonal schizophrenia gets the best of it -- the material careens wildly between sly comedy and creeping suspense, with some ill-advised detours into Borscht-belt humor.

A comedy that's just too erratic and goofy to qualify as satire.

Henceforth, I fear Stepford may acquire new metaphorical implications. It will mean interesting old movies remade into lobotomized new ones.

It is essentially a Stepford movie: A pretty clone with its brains removed, lurching about robotically and reciting predictable inanities.

Satirizing The Stepford Wives is pointless.