`Bedazzled' falls short in offering devil of a time

Movie review

XX 1/2 "Bedazzled," with Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley, Frances O'Connor. Directed by Harold Ramis, from a script by Ramis, Larry Gelbart and Peter Tolan. 90 minutes. Several theaters. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised because of sex-related humor, language and some drug content.

Brendan Fraser will do anything for a laugh. He'll cover his choppers with revolting false teeth, drown his features in horrific makeup, turn his face into a pretzel, and play - no, embrace - his inner buffoon.

To see him play Elliot Richards, the world's most repulsive office nerd, unwanted and avoided by all of his colleagues, is to be witness to a spectacle both embarrassing and strangely captivating. There's nothing endearing or remotely likeable about this creature; even his loneliness doesn't make you sympathize.

Richards is the social outcast no one will ever love, and as an actor Fraser seems perfectly OK with that. Only when the script softens and starts betraying that idea does Fraser lose his grip on the role.

Fraser is the only reason for seeing Harold Ramis' otherwise unnecessary remake of Stanley Donen's "Bedazzled," one of the comic glories of the late 1960s. While the credits acknowledge the original's writers, Dudley Moore and the late Peter Cook, the new writing team has dumbed-down the script to such an extent that the jokes sound like rejects from a Farrelly brothers comedy.

In the original "Bedazzled," Moore played a short-order cook, smitten with an unattainable woman (Eleanor Bron) and willing to sell his soul to the devil (Cook) to win her. Seven wishes were supposed to do the trick, but the devil neatly frustrated each of them. Raquel Welch had a come-hither cameo role as "Lillian Lust" - which may have been the inspiration for casting Elizabeth Hurley as the devil this time.

It doesn't quite work. Fresh from her "Austin Powers" movies, Hurley is enthusiastic enough, especially in the early scenes, as she teases Elliot by making his unattainable woman, Alison Gardner (Frances O'Connor), even less available. But Hurley's sex-bomb act grows tired, partly because she lacks the sense of mystery and mischief Cook brought to the role. She's too transparently evil.

O'Connor, a talented Australian actress with a gift for comedy ("Mansfield Park," "Love and Other Catastrophes"), gets fewer chances than Bron did to make her character click. She's playful enough, especially in an episode in which the devil transforms Elliot into a Colombian drug lord and Alison into his unfaithful wife.

But nothing here is as witty as the sequence in the original film in which the devil turns Moore and Bron's characters into lesbian nuns. In its place, there's an episode in which Elliot finds out his character is gay when he discovers his ability to list the credits of "The Pajama Game."

Donen's "Bedazzled" never got beyond the status of an art-house hit during its 1967 release. Perhaps the creators of the remake felt it necessary to "broaden" the movie's appeal.

In the process, they spend too much time recycling jokes from last summer's teen comedies. One entire episode is devoted to a basketball superstar's genital size. Even the resourceful Fraser seems defeated by its one-note stupidity.