The Stepford Wives

Screenwriter Paul Rudnick (Addams Family Values, In & Out) is a wicked virtuoso with one-liners, so zingers naturally abound in his tongue-in-cheek reworking of the creepy, retrospectively campy 1975 adaptation of Ira Levin's bestselling chiller about suburban spouses turned into sweet, subservient, June Cleaver-like androids. Unfortunately, he isn't remotely as clever when it comes to plot. In fact, as long as he's getting a few incidental laughs, he doesn't seem to care if the story makes a lick of sense, as witness the confusion over whether his automaton Stepford wives are robots (impervious to fire and prone to shooting sparks from their necks) or real women (brainwashed with microchip implants) capable of snapping out of their halcyon daze if their programming fails. Nicole Kidman is good, as always, as a fired TV executive seeking peace and quiet in the 'burbs, only to realize something is amiss. But director Frank Oz's comedy is built around a stereotype at least as bad as the outdated ones it ridicules: the husbands of Stepford are sitcom-spawned Emotionally Immature Idiots, the kind who realize they're always wrong and their wives are right, but never learn anything from it. Not a necessary purchase. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary (by director Joe Nussbaum and costars Alexa Vega, Mika Boorem, Scout Taylor-Compton, and Kallie Flynn Childress), the 10-minute making-of featurette “A Guide to the Perfect Sleepover,” four “Meet the Girls” profile featurettes (2 min. each), three minutes of cast “Sleepover Confessions,” a five-minute gag reel, a brief “Ready, Set, Action” behind-the-scenes segment, a photo gallery, and trailers. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a disappointing film.] (R. Blackwelder)