The credits include the following line: `special thanks to Stanley Donen'. For what? Not complaining? If this film hadn't been released, Donen's original "Bedazzled" might have been re-released, and I might have got a chance to see it. I'm sure it's better.
Peter Cook's devil in the original was (by all accounts) not just a plot device, but a character. Elizabeth Hurley's devil is no more than a granter of wishes and a changer of costumes. All the same I think I preferred her to Brendan Fraser, because I at least had SOME idea what kind of character she was meant to be playing. She was playing the Devil. She may not have had much personality, but at least she didn't CHANGE personalities whenever she changed costumes, as Fraser did.
There's a scene at the end where Elliot (the Brendan Fraser character, the dupe) finally stands up to the office workers who had been making his life hell. You can only buy that scene by forgetting the start of the movie. They didn't make his life hell - HE made THEIR lives hell. He continually forced himself on all of them with his inane blather and his almost sickening craving to be accepted; and while they all loathed him, they were never openly rude or hurtful. (Until the end, when one of them made fun of him simply so that he could be punished for doing so.)
We're never sure if Fraser is meant to be a geek, a doormat, or an everyman. If he's meant to be all three at once, the script fails to establish this, either. When he's thrust into strange situations it's never as funny as it might have been, since don't know where his reactions are coming from. Treat the disjointed story as sketch comedy, though, and it fares little better: the jokes aren't imaginative enough. Take that opening sequence, in which the devil "freeze-frames" randomly chosen individuals and we see tags like "good", "evil" and "drinks from the carton". Unfortunately, "drinks from the carton" is about as clever as it gets.
Peter Cook's devil in the original was (by all accounts) not just a plot device, but a character. Elizabeth Hurley's devil is no more than a granter of wishes and a changer of costumes. All the same I think I preferred her to Brendan Fraser, because I at least had SOME idea what kind of character she was meant to be playing. She was playing the Devil. She may not have had much personality, but at least she didn't CHANGE personalities whenever she changed costumes, as Fraser did.
There's a scene at the end where Elliot (the Brendan Fraser character, the dupe) finally stands up to the office workers who had been making his life hell. You can only buy that scene by forgetting the start of the movie. They didn't make his life hell - HE made THEIR lives hell. He continually forced himself on all of them with his inane blather and his almost sickening craving to be accepted; and while they all loathed him, they were never openly rude or hurtful. (Until the end, when one of them made fun of him simply so that he could be punished for doing so.)
We're never sure if Fraser is meant to be a geek, a doormat, or an everyman. If he's meant to be all three at once, the script fails to establish this, either. When he's thrust into strange situations it's never as funny as it might have been, since don't know where his reactions are coming from. Treat the disjointed story as sketch comedy, though, and it fares little better: the jokes aren't imaginative enough. Take that opening sequence, in which the devil "freeze-frames" randomly chosen individuals and we see tags like "good", "evil" and "drinks from the carton". Unfortunately, "drinks from the carton" is about as clever as it gets.