Yesterday I watched an episode of Sharpe with Elizabeth Hurley in it, and that reminded me of this film which also stars her. I have seen this film before, but I was a teenage boy back then, so my viewing style differed this time. I had the sound on and watched all of it.

The plot here is your typical "Guy can't get the girl. Guy goes on a life changing journey. Guy gets the girl." You know. The kind that only Americans love and only Americans make. Anyway, our hero Elliot starts off as a right goof-ball, before bumping into the British devil who says she will give him 7 wishes in exchange for his soul. He says she's crazy and walks away, but then she appears around the corner and gets him a burger and he seems convinced, which leads me to believe that anyone with an identical twin and a few quid could get this guy to do pretty much anything. I find it hard to believe that it's so easy to go from SHE'S CRAZY! to OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME!! If a man told Elliot his faeces tasted like rainbows, would he be sceptical until the guy took a mouthful himself and then beamed a brown-teethed grin in his direction? If you think someone's mad, they generally are.

The area that this film really falls down is that the devil gives Elliot a device that lets him leave his wishes at any time. This means that the next hour of crazy antics they have lined up for us shouldn't have happened, because surely you would leave a situation before you end up hanging from the bottom of a helicopter being fired at by pissed off Russians with assault rifles. Surely you must see that coming.

The characters in this film are all very one-dimensional. The devil is a swindler, all of the characters Elliot becomes in his wishes are extremes of either stupidity or sensitivity or intelligence, and Elliot himself is just putty to be moulded by these experiences without any resistance at all. He never seems to learn from each failed wish either. You would think a person would just adjust the previous wish to fix the area where it went wrong. Well not Elliot. He thinks if a plan fails then the next logical step is to go for the polar opposite. If being stupid and famous failed because you had a tiny dick, then obviously the remedy is to wish for intelligence and class. That's the sure-fire fix for micro-penis.

The woman he spends all of his wishes trying to get never seems to be nice either. In the first wish she cheats on him, in the second she goes off and cheats on him, in the third she just wants to find out if he has a big dick, and in the other wishes she doesn't get chance to cheat/crotch-watch because he's either gay or Abraham Lincoln. He'd have been better off just wishing that she wasn't a stupid whore.

The film has lots of plot holes, such as why are souls so important? This is a point raised by the characters in the film at one point (and rightfully so). However, they do nothing to solve it. It's as if the film thinks that if it's aware of its problems, that they don't matter.

The film does have some funny moments, but on the whole it's just churned out crap with the most unoriginal plot and bland characters to boot.