It must have seemed a good idea, though a little near the knuckle, to cast Will Ferrell as a fading film star persuaded to perform in a new version of Bewitched, the once popular Sixties television series. And an even better one to have Nicole Kidman as the witch (desperate, this time round, to become an ordinary mortal).
Unfortunately, it doesn't work out quite as director and writer Nora Ephron hoped. In fact, after a promising beginning, it just gets worse and worse.
The failure is partly that Ferrell's attempts at oddball humour fall alarmingly flat, and partly that his apparent lack of charm, equally alarmingly, leaves the necessary romance between him and Kidman to fall into a dead kind of bathos.
We have instead an interminable amount of the nosetwitching that Elizabeth Montgomery made her signature in the original show without the required sense of fun that she brought to it.
There are good moments, and sometimes a good line or two, but the comic sequences - such as Kidman's amateur-hour audition for the show - are entertaining but not nearly sharp enough.
The whole is the perfect illustration of what goes wrong when the two leads in a romantic comedy don't match up. There's nothing much Kidman can do about it, and even Michael Caine as her warlock father and Shirley MacLaine as a self-centred diva seem lost in the mess.
Not a very bewitching Bewitched, then, which seems to go on with the same joke forever.
Bewitched
Cert: PG
