Bedazzled (2000 film)
Bedazzled is a 2000 motion picture, and is a remake of the original Bedazzled (1967). It stars include Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser. It was directed by Harold Ramis.
Plot summary
Elliot Richards (played by Brendan Fraser) works a dead-end job in a call-center and has no real friends. He has a crush on Alison Gardner (played by Frances O'Connor), but has not asked her out. After Elliot is ditched at a bar while trying to talk to Alison, Elliot wishes that Alison was his. The Devil (played by Elizabeth Hurley) hears this wish, and Elliot and the Devil enter into a contract. Elliot gets seven wishes, and in return the Devil will take posession of his soul.
As might be expected of a bargain with Satan, there is a catch to the deal. No matter what Elliot asks for himself, in each case the Devil arranges matters so that he is unhappy with the result :
- He wishes to be rich and powerful, with Alison as his wife. The Devil makes him a Columbian cocaine manufacturer whose wife despises him and is having an affair with her language tutor, and whose business partners are about to double-cross and murder him.
- He wishes to be emotionally sensitive; the Devil makes him so sensitive that he spends much of his time crying at how beautiful the world is, whilst Alison finds comfort with a more macho man.
- He wishes to be ahtletic, the Devil makes him a basketball star but gives him an extremely small penis which causes Alison to lose interest in him.
- He wishes to be President, the Devil makes him Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination.
- He wishes to be intelligent, and witty, and well endowed, the Devil grants this but makes him gay.
After each wish is renounced, Elliot return for a meeting with the Devil in which she blames him for not being specific enough in his desires and prompts him to try again. These meetings take place in a variety of locations, with the Devil each time in a different role in which she carries out a variety of everyday evil acts - dismissing a class full of students from their lesson without any homework, swapping the medication on a hospital trolley for candy, forcing parking meters to expire and writing tickets for the cars.
Eventually Elliot becomes disenchanted with the deal and decides to abandon it. The Devil reacts negatively to this, stating that if he does not live out his final wish at once then by the terms of the contract his soul will be ceded to her at once. When eliott objects that he has two wishes left, she points out that on their first meeting he asked for a big Mac and coke, which she ordered for him. This counts against his total, leaving one wish remaining.
When he dithers, she arranges to have him locked in a prison cell where he meets a mysterious stranger who tells him that he cannot possibly sell his soul as it belongs to god rather than him - although this is left ambiguous, the movie implies that the stranger may be an angel, or possibly even god himself.
Eliott returns to the Devil having become resigned to the futility of the bargain; when she pushes him to make a final wish he blurts out that he wishes that Alison could have a happy life. With this the Devil grudgingly admits that by the terms of his contract a selfless wish voids the entire deal, and sends him away. before they part ways Eliott admits that despite her manipulation of him he has come to like the Devil and regards her as a friend, something she does not object to.
Eliott finally approaches Alison directly and asks her out, only to find that she is involved with somebody. He accepts this with good grace and continues with his life, quickly meeting a new girl.
Quotations
- The Devil : "Seven utterly fabulous wishes for one piddling, little soul?"
- The Devil : "I am the Devil! Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness! Well, the princess, anyway..."
- Elliot : "I'm telling you, the Devil gypped me for a hamburger!"
- The Devil : "Your soul is like your appendix. You never use it."
Elliot : "Oh yeah? If it's so useless, how come you want it so bad?" The Devil : "Oh, aren't you a clever one?"
Trivia
- The Devil claims that on November 16 she will have held her job for six thousand years. This is a reference to Archbishop James Ussher, who used a literal interpretation of the bible to calculate that the world was created on Sunday 23 October 4004BC.
- Producer Trevor Albert has claimed that the schoolgirl outfit worn by Elizabeth Hurley was actually owned by her.
- In a deleted scene Eliott wished to be a rock star, and was shown as a drug addict on the edge of self destruction.
- During the beach scene in the "sensitive" wish the Devil is shown walking two dogs which she calls "Peter" and "Dudley" - a reference to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the stars of the original Bedazzled.
External links
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