Bewitched: Critic Reviews

The Ephron sisters, sophisticates entrusted with a simple TV situation comedy, lose the magic of the com as they mess with the sit.

Outside of the perfomers, which include Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell and a nicely tuned supporting cast, there isn't much to look at here.

Bewitched will not cast you under its spell. It is more likely to bother and bewilder.

After Kidman and Ferrell have hit all the expected marks (meet cute, encounter obstacles, fall in love, encounter fatal setback, fall back in love), the movie winds up being hoist on its own petard, becoming the butt of one of its own inside jokes.

It sinks so deep and fast, you don't even see bubbles on the surface.

A phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show.

Unrivaled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension. To spend even 10 minutes in the movie's universe is to experience the Sartrean nausea of an utterly hollow head and heart.

Though there are funny bits here and there, the script just isn't funny enough.

It is courageously weird -- and that alone casts a spell.

Ms. Kidman goes through it all as if impersonating an adorable trick-or-treater.

Ephron casts a spell full of romantic-comedy charm even as it goes about the post-modern business of toying with our fondness for pop-cultural baubles like Bewitched. Consider the sparkling mood Ephron maintains as irreverent reverence.

What the hell is Will Ferrell doing to his career?

Stepping into Montgomery's shoes is a thankless task, but Kidman comes across as preternaturally flustered by everything that heightened the serenity of her predecessor.

It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one.

An uninspired misfire of a TV-series knockoff that, despite its great cast and smart filmmakers, never manages to scare up much magic.

Who wants a namby-pamby Samantha?

The kind of movie where the lulls between jokes are brief and you leave the theater a little happier than when you came in.

Bewitched is respectful of its origin, and it's brave enough to go beyond the obvious. Unfortunately, it goes beyond in a somewhat wrong direction. As a result, this broom stick doesn't really fly, it just glides along.

So what's left? Pretty much Kidman's consternation and Ferrell's one-man show, which is funny for awhile but eventually even he runs out of gags. Perhaps more cowbell would have helped.

A disaster so low in energy that it jumpstarts its own engine every 10 minutes.

Suffers from its sheer peculiarity as well as a lack of chemistry (or alchemy, for that matter) between leads Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell.

[An] un-magical, unfunny and un-romantic alleged comedy.

The fluffiest surprise of the summer. When it comes to the race for giggles, it's Nicole by a nose.

For one thing, it looks every bit as drab as the average 1966 sitcom did: overlit, flat, studiobound and phony. For another, it's just as unfunny as the original.

Admittedly, there's a certain fascination in watching Kidman deliver these lines. You can see her struggling to make acting decisions with a character who requires none.