Cast: Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Michael Caine. Dir: Nora Ephron.
Presumably Nicole Kidman perfected the famous Bewitched nose wiggle when she first read her lines and wondered where the funny smell was coming from. It was the script, Nicole. It’s a real stinker. Quite why Kidman picked this film is beyond me. Especially after last year’s remake disaster of the dismal Stepford Wives. The formula for transferring TV shows to the big screen is pretty much set in stone by now. Snap up the TV rights, round up a few lower-tier A-listers with a passing resemblance to the original cast, tune out the snide reviews and wait for the big boom to kick in at box office. Well, it’s a hit and miss. This is a remake of the Sixties TV sitcom featuring white witch Samantha, who tries to settle down as a good American housewife with limited success. But those ingenious scriptwriters have added their own bizarre twist.
In this one producers unwittingly cast a real witch (Kidman’s Isabel Bigelow) to play Samantha in a remake of the TV show. A plot which must prove all Hollywood types are on drugs. She co-stars with Will Ferrell. He plays Jack Wyatt, a washed-up TV actor with an ego problem who is down to earth to play the mortal Darrin and needs this show to be a hit (a bit like Ferrell himself after the disastrous Kicking & Screaming).
Inexplicably Isabel falls for the monster and, despite being desperate to cast aside her reliance on witchcraft, is forged to use some trickery to get him to feel the same way. Cue a complicated and pointless toing and froing of high jinx while Isabel casts spells and then has trouble cancelling them out on the idiotic Jack. Considering Nicole’s character has the power to do anything, it’s a shame she doesn’t manage to magic up a few laughs. The best of a bad bunch of jokes is when she conjures a credit card at the till or rewires the TV and DVD with a click of her fingers.
There are so many bits which are supposed to parody the fickleness of the TV world that simply aren’t cutting enough to be remotely funny. Michael Caine even pops up in this peculiar film as Isabel’s dad Nigel. And Shirley Maclaine also has a cameo. To give Nicole her due, she makes the best of a very bad situation, but not even the great Dame Judi Dench could convince me she’d fallen in love with Ferrell’s ridiculously over-the-top Jack.
If ever there was a TV show begging for straight treatment it’s Bewitched. A vain attempt to pump some originality into a tired formula, and bar the odd moment, it’s neither funny nor charming enough, proving a disappointing treatment of fabulous source material.