BEDAZZLED (2000)

Grade: C-

Director: Harold Ramis

Screenplay: Larry Gelbert, Harold Ramis, Peter Tolan

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley, Frances O'Connor, Orlando Jones, Miriam Shor, Gabriel Casseus, Toby Huss, Paul Adelstein

BEDAZZLED is a smug, self satisfied (with no reason to be either) member of the continually growing glut of completely unmemorable, undistinguishable films ushered into multiplexes in order to turn a quick profit. It's pure product, an unfunny slapstick skit comedy straight off the assembly line; this one with a plot snatched from a thirty year old British film; these pictures can't even come up with their own story lines anymore. There is no movie rule I'm aware of that states Hollywood products have to be bad egregious affairs, both MEET THE PARENTS and PITCH BLACK prove otherwise, but what of the majority; wimpy, forgettable focus group ready pap?

What's surprising about BEDAZZLED is, considering the talent behind the camera, how spectacularly unfunny it is. Harold Ramis has remade a supposedly witty British comedy (that's what I hear, haven't seen it) into broad mall fare, but where's the funny? He forgot to give us the funny. Unfortunately what he remembers to give us is Brendan Fraser badly mugging through a series of inert skits.

The film is one of those careful what you wish for thingies with a dorky guy (Brendan Fraser) wishing that he could be handsome and suave, etc and meeting the devil, here in the form of a fetching, yet horrible model/actress (Elizabeth Hurley), who spends the entire movie cooing seductively.

Fraser plays Elliot, an irritating computer geek with a crush on an attractive co-worker (Frances O Connor, looking like a younger Kathie Lee Gifford). At a bar, a group of friends (actually a bunch of tormentors who keep him around to goof on him) coax him into asking her out. She denies and then the camera zooms in on a salaciously puckering Hurley. She's not really the supermodel she appears to be, rather Lucifer in the flesh, and she grants Elliot several wishes, to make him in the image of whatever he chooses, nearly all of which go disastrously wrong until the end when Elliot does exactly what you'd expect.

My initial problem with the picture is that not only is our leading man unlikable, he's downright irritating. Watching him eventually stumble upon happiness is a bit like watching Richard win the million in SURVIVOR. But maybe I'm biased. Fraser's much heralded talents allude me. He's like a big goofily handsome Dustin Diamond (Screech from SAVED BY THE BELL for those uninformed), all exaggerated dorky tics. Some have been calling him the next Tom Hanks; to me he's more like the next Steve Guttenberg. Through his series of transformations Fraser gets to act differently, but he does it all with the overexageration of a failing comedian bellowing "please laugh at me!" He only succeeds in one bit (the one that gets the most commercial time in the film's preview) where he's a Colombian drug lord with a monstrous schnozz. We get to see Fraser as a dopey basketball player, a seven-foot lummox with tattoos and a bleached blonde helmet hair do. Then he's Mr.Sensitive; a freckly faced imp reciting hallmark card slogans with such aggravating energy that a possibly subtle jab at whiny New Age self-help geeks is turned into grating schtick. Then we see him as a suave sophisticate and on and on. I wanted them all to just go away and leave me be.

Studying my trusty notepad as I write this up I move to Elizabeth Hurley, whose name I simply followed with "annoying". Allow me to elaborate; Hurley is as annoying as she is stunningly beautiful…got the picture yet. Her performance could be used in an argumentative lecture on why models should be just that.

Far more interesting than the movie was the strange couple sitting behind me. The man, who I did not catch a glimpse of but I picture him to be this big bearish, lumberjack kind of fellow, the sort who wears overalls and belches proudly, laughed at many painfully unfunny moments, his laughter something of a throaty growl, almost like Billy Bob Thornton's little tic in SLING BLADE; sort of a mmm mmmm. And then his wife who I'd picture to be a Susie Homemaker type, maybe Donna Reed with a couple extra pounds on her. Actually now that I think about her maybe a bit more like Mrs.Poole from THE HOGAN FAMILY for those who remember (if not don't brood too heavily). She had a laugh that was something like a hee hee hee, and together they were almost symphonic, him mmm mming and she hee heeing.

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