Daydream Believer

Film night. This one was twenty years in the making, as the role of arch-fantasist Walter Mitty was originally considered to be an ideal vehicle for Jim Carrey in the mid-Nineties, before passing through the in-tray of every man-of-the-moment for two decades (including, bizarrely, Sacha Baron Cohen) until Ben Stiller turned out to be the only one with nowt better to do. Doubling up as director, Stiller turns Mitty from the dedicated daydreamer of the original short story - a man whose flights of fancy were part and parcel of his entire existence - into a more generic Mid-Life Crisis Man who needs to experience adventure and see the world for himself before he can get the girl. It's been done before, and far more profoundly, but Stiller manages to hit the right notes and even get a couple of well-crafted jokes in (the Benjamin Button spoof is a highlight).

A decent couple of hours; perhaps not worth the twenty years of development, but probably better than it would have been with Jim Carrey.