Watch this film… only if there’s nothing better on the telly.

I saw it on a plane coming home from holiday and quite enjoyed it. I didn’t have much else to do and the in-flight magazine, Altitude, wasn’t really worth reading.

In case you didn’t know, it’s a postmodern (is it old-fashioned to say that now?) take on the 1960s TV series Bewitched, the one with Elizabeth Montgomery playing Samantha, a suburban housewife who happens to be a witch (as in cat and broomstick; not as in running around naked and healing things with crystals). The twist with the film is that it’s about a guy, Will Farrell, trying to produce a remake of the TV series, who inadvertantly casts a real witch in the star rôle. Hilarity ensues, occasionally.

It’s a lumpy, inconsistant film, with some laugh-out-loud moments, and a few bits where it was clear that all the script-writers were off to the pub that day and the office cleaners had filled in a few pages.

Honestly, it doesn’t actually deserve a long review; it’s candyfloss and candyfloss, as I mentioned, of mixed quality.

Nicole Kidman is pretty good in it, as the Samantha character. Unfortunately the script paints her less as the ‘amusing fish out of water’ and more as the ‘fish with its brain removed’. Her character really goes far beyond ‘naïve’, into the murky depths of ‘stupid.’

Whats-his-features, Will Farrell (in the Darren rôle), is awful and mugs his way shamelessly through the whole thing, pausing in his mugging occasionally to prat-fall or overact.

The supporting cast is mostly good. (Michael Caine is usually good, even in bad films.)

Oh, look, you are hardly going to go out of your way to watch this thing, so enjoy it if you see it, and don’t feel like you’ve missed out on anything sepcial if you don’t.

(And I never understood what was so special about Samantha twitching her nose. Can nobody else see that she’s really just twitching her mouth?

Gah!)