Herald rating: * *
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Liz Hurley, Frances O'Connor
Director: Harold Ramis
Running time: 93 mins
Rating: PG.
Screening: Hoyts, Village
Review: Peter Calder
I had expected to detest this remake of the 1967 film penned at the peak of their fame by the anarchic English comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley
Moore.
British humour, after all, so often seems to emerge pre-digested in American remakes and the original - in which Cook was a deadpan Devil tempting Moore's downtrodden short-order cook - seemed so perfectly emblematic of their comic partnership.
The new version is co-written by Larry Gelbart, who penned much of television's M*A*S*H as well as Tootsie.
It's devoid of any such resonance and its seven-wish structure makes it clunky at times, but it has moments of genuine wit.
The Moore role, as taken by the versatile Fraser (George of the Jungle and Gods and Monsters) is that of Elliot Richards, the office dork whose colleagues scatter to avoid him and who droops with unrequited longing for co-worker Alison (O'Connor).
He bumps into a slinky, red-leather-clad Lucifer (Hurley) and is offered the familiar Faustian deal - his heart's desire in return for his soul.
The mayhem which results is only intermittently funny (in the first, best wish-fulfilment sequence he wants to be rich, powerful and married to Alison; he becomes a Colombian drug lord openly cuckolded by his wife's English teacher).
But the film is kept afloat by Fraser's considerable comic talent.
Sly in-jokes maintain the amusement. Richards' mates appear, transformed Wizard of Oz-style, in the fantasy sequences. When the devil appears on a beach in one she has two snarling Rottweilers, named Peter and Dudley, on her leash.
Hurley's Devil, unlike Cook's, lacks an overarching sense of irony. (But it has some great one-liners. "I think you're hot," Richards says when she seductively first corners him; "Baby," she coos, "you have no idea"). And the ending, so leadenly moralistic it makes the toes curl, was to be expected.
But it's not the disaster it might have been - though that's faint praise, perhaps, for the man who made Analyse This and the comic gem Groundhog Day.
