The Unseen Movie Review

Bewitched

The 1960s saw two sitcoms revolving around suburban couples where the wife had magical powers, the genie-based I Dream of Jeannie and witch-based Bewitched. Both had their moments, the former largely thanks to the presence of Larry “JR” Hagman as the long-suffering husband, the latter thanks to the wiggly-nosed charms of Elizabeth Montgomery.

Between them these two shows built up nearly 300 episodes – each and every one concerned with the need to prevent friends and relations of the central couple from finding out about the wife’s powers. That’s around 9,000 hours of comedy all hinging on one basic premise – is there anything left for a feature-length movie? Well, considering next year promises an I Dream of Jeannie flick as well, someone in Hollywood seems to think so.

Still, a straight update of the original sitcom premise seems to have been decided not to be quite interesting enough. Instead we get a slightly postmodern take on the thing – this is a film about updating the sitcom, with Will Ferrell as the star set to play the beleaguered husband and Nicole Kidman as the unknown cast to play his witchy wife. With this premise, the twist is predictable – Kidman’s character is a genuine witch. A witch pretending to be a regular human playing a witch pretending to be a regular human. It’s as much a magical version of the Julie Andrews classic Victor/Victoria, where the dancing Dame played a woman pretending to be a female impersonator, as it is a straight update of the sitcom from which the film takes its name.

It’s a moderately promising premise, if a tad odd to waste the rights to a remake on something that isn’t quite a remake, with a quality cast that includes Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine, teaming up again as they did in 1966’s sub-par caper movie Gambit, as Kidman’s supernaturally-powered parents.

Sadly, however, neither the plot nor the characters really seem to sparkle. Co-written and directed by Norah Ephron, the woman responsible for, among others, classic romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, the emphasis on the frankly implausible blossoming relationship between the egotistical Ferrell and sweetly innocent Kidman never quite manages to engage, while the comedy set-ups are all fairly predictable and repetitive.

The cast try their best with the lacklustre material, but they really haven’t got much to work with, and Ephron’s unimaginative, visually uninteresting direction really doesn’t offer any help. It’s perhaps ironic that, in a movie revolving around witchcraft and the kindling of love, there is absolutely none of that Hollywood magic which lifts mediocre films to the level of something special. Considering it took them thirty years to get this sitcom onto the big screen, you think they would have tried a little harder to create something worthy of the name.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 4:12 AM