Thirty years after the release of the critically acclaimed original here is the critically slammed remake.

Nicole Kidman is a hard as nails television executive who makes feminist television reality shows. She gets fired when a male victim of one of her shows goes postal.

Matthew Broderick plays her husband and is also a media executive. He has noticed the despite being a successful couple their marriage has suffered because of the work/life balance.

After her dismissal the couple move to the town of Stepford which seems like an idyllic retreat from the stresses and strains of the rat race in the city. The wives are the stay at home types and the husbands seems to be all rest and play. Not sure who does any work!

Broderick recognizes that Stepford is a happy community. Kidman along with frumpy author Bette Midler and a renowned gay designer finds there is something wrong with this white picket fenced Republican wet dream.

This version is a satire mixed with black humour and a surprisingly amiable film as long as you park your brain elsewhere. The film went through re-shoots with an ending that does not work. Then again a lot of the film does not work if you spend too long thinking about it. Its as a half good idea and an unfinished script which got the green light to go into production.

Are these women robots or was there some sort of brain re- programming? If they are robots the original women must be dead? We have a scene where one of the women dispenses bank notes for some reason. If its some sort of brain re-programming then the women could become normal at the end of the film. However the film wants it both ways which means the script was not ready, unsure or had to be re-shot later on.

I haven't seen the original film in a while, but I remember absolutely loving it especially for the quality of the acting and how interesting it was. This remake of The Stepford Wives is not as abominable as the Psycho and Wicker Man remakes, but that is saying very little because very little, if anything, in this movie works at all.

I will admit the way the film looks is not bad at all, at least the scenery is striking and the photography not on slip-shod level. However, coming from a very keen musician and music enthusiast I did find the soundtrack rather forgettable. However that is the least of The Stepford Wives' problems.

The story for starters is very predictable, right up to the contrived finale. The black humour is lowbrow and misses the mark far too many times to make it truly funny, and some scenes drag on for too long. The cast is great on paper, but Nicole Kidman looks bored, Bette Midler's character grates and she overdoes it and Matthew Broderick is miscast and in an embarrassing way.

In all honesty though, the characters are not at all likable and mostly very uninteresting. So all in all, a great disappointment and one of my least ever remakes. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) is an aggressive TV executive whose programming cause a contestant to snap and try to kill her. She's fired and her family moves to Stepford, Connecticut to escape from it all. Once there, she finds there is something wrong with all the women.

This starts with a horribly ugly introduction to Joanna. Then her husband played by Matthew Broderick look like a clueless idiot. Then he turns evil. All the guys are weaklings. All the women look like they're plastic. I guess it's a satire. But I don't think any of it is funny. These characters are as fake as they come.

Every character is just so broad. Every character is just so annoying. And then, there are the problems with the ending. Without spoilers, the ending is a mess that leaves a big question up in the air.