**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley, Frances O’Connor, Orlando Jones, Miriam Shor, Paul Adelstein, Toby Huss, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Gabriel Casseus
Directed by Harold Ramis & written by Ramis, Peter Tolan, and Larry Gelbart, from the story and screenplay by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
2000
93 min PG13
God and the Devil must be really getting bored with human beings. We’re so predictable.
“Bedazzled” is like the more recent film “The Butterfly Effect,” in which we are introduced to a small group of characters and, through the supernatural, we are able to glimpse several different versions of their lives and relationships. While “The Butterfly Effect” uses time travel, “Bedazzled” uses a deal with the Devil, allowing a luckless loser the opportunity to see what his life would be like if he were smarter, handsomer, stronger, more sensitive. But the appeal is still the same, and our protagonist learns that the resulting alternate realities are always in some way just as flawed as where he started out. “Bedazzled” is aimed at comedy, while “The Butterfly Effect” gets most of its laughs unintentionally.
Brendan Fraser plays a luckless, friendless, hopeless helpdesk operator madly in love with the woman of his dreams (Frances O’Connor). The Devil is played not by an evil guy with a goatee but by supermodel Elizabeth Hurley, in what is essentially a one-joke character: the Devil’s a babe. Funny for a while. She spends most of the film in clothing that is some combination of insubstantial or skin tight; that Fraser doesn’t want to get into her goodies is kind of baffling, considering that he’s willing to sell his soul anyway.
“Bedazzled” settles into a comfortable pattern of Fraser asking for things, entering an alternate reality where he has those things, and then retreating back to the Devil when he finds out he asked for the wrong thing. When he asks for wealth and to be married to his beloved, he’s a stinking rich drug dealer and she’s having an affair. When he asks to be sensitive, he’s so sniveling and captivated by the sunset that his beloved runs off with some jocks. When he asks to become intelligent he finds “existentialism yummy.” Something goes wrong with that, too, but I can’t ruin the entire movie for you. In each universe, the schmucks who bedevil Fraser around the office join him in various roles, usually as his sycophants.
Each of “Bedazzled’s” incarnations has its share of giggles, mostly from how effortlessly Fraser embodies the overblown archetype version of each new identity he adopts. When he becomes a seven-foot basketball player, he is built like a Teutonic god, sweats like something out of “Airplane!” and has a vocabulary of about seven words. Everyone in his drug dealer universe is as loud and expansive as anyone in “Scarface.” The best of the alternate universes was cut from “Bedazzled’s” theatrical release and features Fraser as a rock star who crosses Marilyn Manson with Alice Cooper. The sequence is the movie’s most athletic, as we whirl around a stage performance and a backstage debauchery that involves smokes, drugs, vomit, and many uses of the word “dude.” Of course everyone has a British accent when they’re rockers.
Like John Legiuzamo, Brendan Fraser has achieved fame through comic roles when in fact he is much better at dramatic acting. Watch him more than hold his own with Michael Caine in “The Quiet American” and Ian McKellan in “Gods and Monsters.” He and the Devil are supposed to be the main characters of the film, but she, like I said, is a one-trick pony, and Fraser’s character is ultimately malleable. That he is completely at the service of the premise of each alternate universe is kind of forgivable, but when we come back home he’s still just a cardboard cut-out, this time of the hapless loser. He has to mug a lot to make up for what the writers left out. We never learn anything about him because there’s nothing to learn, and the film ends up feeling a little insubstantial.
The movie is directed by Harold Ramis, whose “Groundhog Day” is a superior example of the powers of comedy and supernatural fiction to pierce our innermost desires. “Bedazzled” is without an overwhelming urge to exist. Its expressed purpose is typically centrist multiplex mush about heaven and hell being what we make on Earth, with little interest in the next world or morality. But the movie is insincere about its lesson and it feels tossed off. In the end, Fraser learns that the Devil isn’t such a bad gal, but does the movie mean that? If the movie were serious about trips through hell being necessary to find heaven, or how we must do evil in order to find ourselves, or if it were even cynical enough to say that it is ONLY through evil that we can understand ourselves, then it would have more “zing.” It doesn’t matter whether I agree with these themes, but if they or anything else substantial had been present then there would have been more humor, more satire. As “Bedazzled” is now, its different universes could go in any order and its laughs never quite go over the top. But it did make me laugh.
Finished April 3rd, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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