"The Stepford Wives"

This new "Stepford Wives" may think it's a satire, but it isn't really: It's more of a knowing spoof, a politely cranky little comic diatribe that reminds us, with many winks and twinkles, that even in these enlightened times, we're still forced to fight conformity, dammit. The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start. For one thing, as in the earlier version, it's hard to see exactly how these retrofitted women fit any guy's idea of the feminine ideal: Pretty sundresses are one thing, but what guy doesn't run a mile from any woman who shows the least interest in wearing a tiara? The movie sets up not a row of straw men, but a chorus line of girls woven from the finest gold straw available: The wives of Stepford were all, Joanna learns, formerly successful business figures before their far less successful husbands, feeling jealous and diminished and ignored, transformed them into docile robotic sorority girls. If these guys were truly evil, wouldn't they be milking their wives' earning power, the better to spend it on assorted on-the-side tootsies? Or at least putting them into some hot stripper get-ups? (Now that would make for a hot bake sale.)

But "The Stepford Wives" just tootles along aimlessly before smacking into a hard lump of a surprise ending that makes no sense whatsoever. The picture is never as sharp as it needs to be: It's fully aware of its own cleverness without being actually clever. (Even the opening credits, a cute, jazzy montage of brightly colored '50s-housewife motifs, seems to be trying way too hard.) And neither Oz nor Rudnick ever quite grabs ahold of the movie's tone. That may not be entirely their fault. It's public knowledge that the movie was tinkered with at the 11th hour after test audiences expressed befuddlement over its "dark" undertones. Whatever Oz had to do to "The Stepford Wives," it has unfortunately entered the no-tone zone. In his scramble to make the picture more palatable to a mass audience, he may have filed whatever teeth it ever had down to mere gummy stubs. It's something of a Stepford movie: You keep peering in there to see if there are any brains at work, and though you catch an occasional glimmer of something, it's not quite enough to convince you.

Then again, it's more likely that the premise never had the juice to begin with. In some ways, this new version is an improvement. Shot by Rob Hahn, it has an elegant, crisp look: You could call the whole thing a wicked visual riff on the notion of the male gaze, a case of the lens capturing an idea that a movie's dialogue and structure can only scratch at. Christopher Walken, as the creepy techie who heads the Men's Association, struts through the movie with the confidence of a long-legged stray cat. And even in a nothing role like this one, Kidman throws off a distinctively sharp sweetness: Her beauty is so coolly porcelain that she teeters on the edge of being off-putting. But I find her beguiling. Even when I'm hard-pressed to believe a thing her character does or says, I somehow find myself believing in the essence of Kidman.

But not even Kidman's heady perfume is enough to counteract the halo of White Linen that hovers around "The Stepford Wives." The wives of Stepford, poor things, have lost their brains. Wit and style mean nothing to them; they don't care about books or politics or current events or, we can assume, movies. They're a fictional force who nonetheless represent a very real danger, and we must stop them immediately -- particularly before they fill out any more comment cards at test screenings.

• View blog reactions