Probably the most important lapse on the part of the filmmakers was a failure to manage the tone. Typically, you pick a tone and keep with it, or, if you think you're really inspired, you can "play" with the tone, in the hopes that your audience will pick up on that spirit of play and go along for the ride.
Well, it appears the director told the actors to play scenes in a crazy quilt of styles, and one doesn't get the sense of a grand spirit of play. One example of this that stuck out like a sore thumb, for me personally, was directing Adam Scott and his little coterie to play cartoonish, stock "pr1ck office nemeses". Later, we're supposed to somehow integrate that with the storyline involving Stiller's travels and dawning awareness of the significance of his little life; and the tone mismatches just seem to negate each other; they just don't (narratively) compute.
Somehow, the filmmakers failed to weave the spell. Another example is that we're supposed to (also) integrate a love/romance angle. And yet the exposition is directed poorly, paced/edited tepidly, and so it falls flat. There's nothing romantic whatsoever about that substory.
The miracle of film is that master filmmakers somehow manage to piece together the fragments of shots/footage, shot on various days, with the actors/weather/staff in ever-shifting states of being, and produce something narratively cogent and compelling. "Mitty" fails to do this, period.
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And I'd like that. But that 5h1t ain't the truth. --Jules Winnfield
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