Review by gregorwossilus

This remake offers a good cast, a promising team and first and foremost a very intriguing plot. Unfortunately the filmmakers could not entirely decide whether to make a sci fi thriller like the movie from the seventies or a comedy. It has a wonderful opening-credit sequence which hails the fifties with their nightmarish perfect-housewife-commercials and groundbreaking kitchen inventions. Then the movie sets his tone introducing Nicole Kidman as a superpopular TV-host (Mr. Kidman was never colder as a character)who bathes herself in the success of her cruel real-time TV shows. After getting fired for basically ruining peoples lives with inhumanly disgusting shows she finds herself in the superclean and somewhat unreal little town of Stepford. While Kidman's character is very well developed, her husband's is not. Matthew Broderick fails to persuade us that he is a true heartbreaker and a great companion for a career-woman such as Kidman. You don't believe that she actually fell in love with him, he is just to weak and boring.The couple just does not seem to belong together, the same problem we found in COLD MOUNTAIN with Kidman and Jude Law. Later we do not want to buy that Broderick's character is turned around by the macho-attitudes of the Stepford-husbands, he is too nice for that.

In the third act the whole thing collapses because the filmmakers do not succeed in turning this comedy into a really frightening thriller. This story is interesting because of the horrible truth being discovered at the end. Instead of leaving us with an open end which would make us moan the characters we fell in love with before (Kidman, Bette Midler) this movie delivers us a poor explanation that takes away the horror - and the horror is the most attractive part of this story in the first place. THE STEPFORD WIVES wants to be a comedy and a thriller, wants to be sarcastic, full of secrets, exiting, a little heart worming and shocking - and is nothing of the above completely. A straight thriller with this cast and crew would have made a great film. OK, I also had some laughs...only to bow my head during the last 15 minutes!