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Stepford Wives, The

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 58 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Musical | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Paul Rudnick
Ira Levin (book)
Directed by: Frank Oz
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 11, 2004
DVD: November 9, 2004
Running Time: 93 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for sexual content, thematic material and language
Starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Faith Hill, Glenn Close, Roger Bart, and Jon Lovitz
Stepford has a secret. All of the wives are far too perfect, and all of the husbands are way too happy. The Stepford Wives is a sophisticated and comic re-imagining of the 1975 suspense classic. Welcome to Stepford -- the American way of love. (Paramount Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Bowfinger Death at a Funeral Dirty Rotten Scoundrels In & Out Little Shop of Horrors The Score
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Contrary to recent rumors that it was a dud, the new Stepford Wives, with its chocolate-box visual style, archly heavy-handed foreshadowing and its scene-for-scene parody of the original's fright strategies (Walken's waxy menace is once again played for laughs), is a gas.
Read Full Review >Newsweek Cathleen McGuigan
Glenn Close, Bette Midler and Roger Bart (who plays one half of a gay couple slated for Stepfordizing) are hilarious, and even Nicole Kidman flashes comedic gifts not seen since "To Die For."
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
The star of this overachieving trifle is not Kidman, it's Paul Rudnick. The New York playwright and screenwriter ("In & Out") has taken a pair of dated watermarks from the '70s - Ira Levin's horror novel and its faithful 1975 movie adaptation - and turned them into a broad, feverishly fey parody.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The 1975 movie tilted toward horror instead of comedy. Now here's a version that tilts the other way, and I like it a little better.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
I had a fabulous time. Well, I did once I accepted that it was a campfest--a great Provincetown drag show of The Stepford Wives.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
You feel some of the strain in this immaculately shot, designed and costumed farce, but it's fast and the cast is lively, even though a lost-looking Broderick rarely gets to shoot his patented bewildered look.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Because the entire audience knows what's going on, the filmmakers hope to distract viewers from storytelling weaknesses with an urgent sense of style.
Read Full Review >Variety Brian Lowry
Another "remake" that merits the title in name only, The Stepford Wives isn't the "troubled" disaster that media reports have suggested it might be, yet nor do its oddly matched parts ever congeal into a fully formed creation.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
If the filmmakers had made a point of satirizing the new makeover culture in ways that went beyond camp jibes at décor and suburbia, they might have come up with a classic.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The film's creepier moments are pathetically weak, and its thematic update fails to attain the minimal credibility that even a wild farce needs to sustain itself.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Close gets laughs, as does Bette Midler as a Jewish rebel. But the sting is gone.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Isn't so much bad as it is puny: a sporadically amusing, occasionally funny, but ultimately bland and pointless time killer.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Only Close, in a majestically, maniacally brittle demonstration of Stepford overdrive, has the courage to show how nutty the pursuit of domestic perfection is. In this mess of a film, she is perfection.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Before it degenerates into a complete mess, it's an entertaining mess, and something about its willingness to please maintains the audience's goodwill throughout.
Read Full Review >New York Post Megan Lehmann
Boasts a stellar ensemble cast and some priceless one-liners -- but those pearls of acerbic wit have been strung together on a cheap piece of thread which almost inevitably breaks in the third act.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
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.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Almost desperate to show it gets its own point. What's funny is that the joke--"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" reconfigured as anti-feminist backlash--was scarcely fresh when Bryan Forbes shot the first movie version nearly 30 years ago.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
It was somebody's nitwit idea to rip out the story's guts and brains for a sour sellout of a finale -- which finds the filmmakers behaving exactly like Stepford men and turning an original into a dummy.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
If the film is to work on any level, even a comedic one, it's necessary for the viewers to sympathize with Joanna and Walter. However, the script and scattershot performances keep them at arm's length. Nicole Kidman is in full scenery-chewing mode, and Matthew Broderick hasn't been this invisible since Ferris Bueller had to go back to school.
Read Full Review >Premiere Peter Debruge
Close is the best and worst thing about the film, delivering a performance that upstages even Christopher Walken (!), taking her over-the-top Cruella de Vil turn to its saccharine-sweet opposite.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
Lured to the project with John Cusack as her original co-star (cruelly replaced by Matthew Broderick), Nicole Kidman phones it in.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Kevin Carr
The story and themes behind The Stepford Wives are way past their time. Theyre products of the 1960s.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
The result: an empty comedy that takes hackneyed potshots at consumerism.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The film contains so many endings that it's hard to tell what impressions the filmmakers want us to leave the theater with. Buy a copy of the book instead. It remains an excellent read.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Karen Karbo
So god-awful it falls into the category of needing to be seen to be believed. A purported satire of the 1975 camp horror classic, it succeeds in failing on almost every level, including knowing what it's actually satirizing.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Misbegotten is the only way to describe this remake of the 1975 film based on Ira Levin's cultural-zeitgeist novel.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.
What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 3.2 (out of 10) based on 58 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Nick A. gave it a1:
Well what an insult to the original, I don't care if people say this is a different take or that this is just a bit of cheesy fun, if you're going to call yourselves a remake of a film then for god sakes stick to the elements that made the original so splendid. I mean how can you take such a good cast and turn out this pile of crap. This goes down in my lists of remakes that should never see the light of day ever again.
joe s. gave it a10:
My favorite movie.
Nicole gave it a0:
To begin, I am a Kidman fan and I also enjoyed the original Stepford Wives movie. Because of the previews, I did not expect this movie to be great, and was surprised when it turned out to be FAR worse than I thought. The revised plot is terrible, the "acting" is insulting, and the ending is ridiculous. I advise you to save yourself. It is not worth the time or effort to see - not even on cable.
Peter J. gave it a3:
I rented this movie because my wife wanted to see it, so I was not expecting much at all. I expected it to be bad, and sure enough, it was. The biggest thing that bothered me was the casting. Kidman and Broderick do not go together at all. Bad chemistry. The rest of the movie was truly a bore, even my wife fell alseep. Again, I wasn't expecting much, so I can't say I was disappointed at all.
Kevin E. gave it a4:
Just keep telling yourself, 'It's about the art direction." and you might make it through. Really uneven, starts out cringe-ingly bad with Kidman mugging up a storm at her firing, picks up with the arrival of Glenn Close, falters again, picks up again with the arrival of Roger Bart as Stepford's flamingest newcomer, falters again, Midler valiantly rescues it, Walken buries it again... and on and on. A few surprisingly good, comic moments but mostly a mess. No one bothered to decide whether or not the robots were separate from or the same as the original human that was tinkered with (details!).
Ilze S. gave it a 1:
This movie was so stupid. I liked only Nicole Kidman. So empty!
Abby H. & Amy B. gave it a 7:
Amy: Good & Okay Abby: Liked It. Interesting, but not as good as the original.
