If showbiz was baseball, Nicole Kidman would be precariously close to striking out. Last summer she floundered in The Stepford Wives and now she's doing a similar drowning act in Bewitched.
It's not all Kidman's fault that Bewitched is strangely devoid of magic and merriment, but she's at the core of the problem.
For the first third of the movie the Oscar-winning actress is all ditzy and breathy as if channelling Marilyn Monroe.
Without warning or logic she tries her hand at paying homage to Katharine Hepburn, or at least the kind of strong women Hepburn played so well.
Neither personality is charming enough to be Samantha the nose-wiggling, finger-snapping witch from Bewitched.
Actually, Kidman isn't playing Samantha and her alter ego Serena that Elizabeth Montgomery created in one of TV's most beloved sitcoms of the 1960s.
Kidman is Isabel Bigelow, a witch who wants to become mortal.
She chooses L.A. for her transformation, which is part of the joke because this is a city known for its own brand of back-stabbing black magic.
Isabel arrives just as a TV network is casting the role of Samantha in a new Bewitched series.
The big joke in this film version of Bewitched is the series is being built around a hammy actor named Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell), who has been hired to play Darrin, Samantha's hubby.
Jack's the kind of diva who overacts and upstages everyone around him.
Good joke except the last laugh is on Nora Ephron who directed the screenplay she wrote with her sister Delia Ephron.
By casting Ferrell she's dealing with a Frankenstein monster of her own.
The man wouldn't know subtlety if it bit him on any part of his anatomy.
He's undeniably funny in a Chevy Chase kind of slapstick way, but he's never in the same movie as Kidman, who rightfully assumed Ephron was trying to pay homage to the sparkling romantic comedies of the 1950s.
Worse still is what Ephron and the screenplay do to Michael Caine, who plays Isabel's philandering warlock father, and Shirley MacLaine as the actress playing Samantha's witchy mother Endora who, like Isabel, might just be the real thing.
Caine and MacLaine are old pros who know what's funny in a gesture or cadence but are given so little screen time it's criminal.
Darrin in the original Bewitched was played by two different actors. That's how minor a character he was.
It would have been hilarious had Ephron done the same thing with the movie, but you can't do that when you hire Ferrell.
You have to let him go wild which he does at the expense of the movie itself.
Bewitched makes some hilarious comments about acting styles, acting temperaments, agents, producers and on-set behaviour and misbehaviour.
These kind of insider jokes play really well in L.A., but lose their sting the farther east they have to travel.
With so much working against it and so little working for it, Bewitched needed a spell or two to rescue it.
(This film is rated PG)
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