movie review - Bewitched
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
You know how it goes with airline movies. You get stuck in front of the kind of thing you'd walk out on if it were any other location. Flicks like Hello, Again and Overboard, for instance, which I sat through in trans-Atlantic flights in the 80's and which were so bad I can still recall having forcibly ignored them after the point which I gave up on them. More recent examples of this phenomemon included Life, which was potently cast but which left me angry, or Rat Race, which had already made me walk out of a cinema for the first and only time before it was forced in front on me on a plane.
Bleah.
So, let me tell you why this one gets zero stars: bad story-telling. Not just incompetent execution (which is common enough) but full-on failure to tell the story. The main story line is a severely disinteresting mess in which concepts are unfullfilled (why is the protagonist in this situation? Her mother is missing. Does her mother ever turn up, or does the protagonist look for her mother? No.). But worse than that -- THE MOVIE DOESN'T FINISH TELLING THE WELL-DEVELOPED SECONDARY SUBPLOT. The slightly sexy subplot with the inspired casting of Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine. The subplot in which the central plot is not only counterpointed nicely, but quite potentially flipped on its ass. In fact, until Michael Caine suddenly - and in a rather distracted fashion, as if someone offscreen were training a gun on him - suggests that he might (or might not) go check out Aruba and then saunters offscreen not to be seen again, it rather seems that the subplot might just be a significant portion of the main plot. Seriously - the subplot is so much stronger it actually has you half-believing that the central story is a deliberate farce, and that the joke will reveal itself shortly. But no, Caine vanishes, and MacLaine does too (without even an excuse). And with them goes any semblance of hope for this film.
When the credits rolled, I just stared at the screen in disbelief.
Not recommended.