Harold Ramis' remake of the 1967 movie Bedazzled doesn't really have the punch of the original, in which Peter Cook plays the Devil and Dudley Moore plays Stanley Moon, a short-order cook in a hamburger joint whose only desire is to win the hand (and body) of the waitress Margaret ....

But despite being given seven wishes by the Devil, somehow Stanley can never get the scenario quite right. Most of the time he and Margaret end up together, but there's always a problem -- he's a woman, for example, or else she's married to someone else who's a saint, so that their putative adultery causes both of them untold agonies ....

It's a funny movie, in its quiet and understated British way, but it also makes us uncomfortable. For Stanley Moon is just like we are and the pact he makes with the Devil too much like the little "arrangement" we try to have with God as we understand God. Surely we deserve a better life than we have right now -- and surely it's worth selling our souls (our ability to be happy but ignorant) for a world we can understand and control ....

Unfortunately, as Stanley Moon discovers, what we want isn't really on offer. If we're lucky, we might acquire the same wisdom that Stanley attains when, at the end of the movie, he decides it's really less painful to accept life just as it is.