Headscratchers / Bedazzled (2000)

• According to the Devil at the end of the film, she and God are both fairly affable chessmasters that just tempt people in either direction of the morality spectrum, but humanity is still responsible for most of their own happiness and misery. Yeah, except for the part when she replaces a bunch of hospital patients' medicine with various candies, likely ruining the lives of arbitrary loved ones everywhere.
  • Thus the "most" in the Devil's phrasing. Remember when it's only pure luck in timing that stops Elliot from dying when he becomes Abraham Lincoln? She certainly has no problem with endangering people's lives.
    • But the Devil can't allow Elliot to die until he has used all 7 wishes. She doesn't get his soul until all the wishes are used up so if he died before he used all his wishes, then she couldn't have a clear claim to his soul. It's most likely she was just doing some very convincing scaring.
    • Not necessarily. It could be that if he dies before his wishes are used up, she gets his soul early. Or he has to use a wish to comeback to life before he can try again. This is the Prince of Lies we’re talking about here. Or Princess, as it were.
  • Sounds reasonable to me. The Devil may do some evil things, but isn't it God that's responsible for children being molested and houses burning up with people inside?
    • Only if you're a bitter Nay-Theist.
    • Wait, I think that was a communication mishap on the part of the original poster. I think the original poster meant that sometimes when horrible disasters happen, God's followers claim that God works in mysterious ways. So, sometimes people could get the impression that God is evil from the way his followers portray him. I think that was the original poster's actual argument. They could have phrased it better, admittedly.
    • Or it could mean an all-loving, all-powerful God could prevent those things, but doesn't. This is known as the "Problem of "Evil."
  • Then there's the fact that she's, you know, evil. What's to say she wasn't lying?
  • I kind of assumed everything that he saw during his encounter with her was suspect and might just be images she's putting in his mind. It's not like he REALLY turned into Gene Simmons or whatever.
    • This is quite possible, as it would go towards being All Part of the Show. She's got to convince Elliot that she's an utter Card-Carrying Villain, so she fakes a couple of incidences of doing stuff For the Evulz. Either that or the whole Satan Is Good thing was an eleventh hour addition to the script when they couldn't figure out a satisfactory ending otherwise.
  • Chances are hospital staff would notice that an entire tray of different kinds of pills have been replaced with Tic Tacs. She was probably just trolling a few nurses.
  • Also possible is that she only replaced prescribed placebos.
  • Or an angel went by replacing the candy with real medicine again as soon as the devil and Elliot left.
  • I didn't take her words to mean "God can't do anything good and the devil can't do anything bad, only humans themselves can". There is evil inflicted by the devil herself, just as there is good caused by God himself. Rather, what she meant, in my opinion, is that neither God nor devil can make you a good or an evil person. Nobody but yourself can force you to do either good or bad deeds - which, in turn, will determine whether you go to Heaven or to Hell. And while the Devil can do bad to you and God can do good to you, in the end, whether you feel yourself happy or miserable - i.e., in your personal heaven or personal hell - is ultimately up to you only.
• Why didn't Elliot ever call the Devil out on the first wish being counted even though he made it and then signed a contract guaranteeing him seven wishes? I'm sure some sort of clause in the contract would have been brought up to Hand Wave it away, but it's strange that he didn't even try.
  • He did call her out. "Well, that doesn't seem fair." "Fair?! Just who do you think you're talking to?"
  • Think of it this way. If you buy a car from me and I hand you the keys before you sign the paperwork that doesn't mean I still owe you another car.
  • Also, the Devil might have specifically went after Elliot because he was so easy to befuddle and intimidate and not ask those kind of questions (at least, not ask while still recovering from the shock of meeting the friggin' Devil).
    • More generally, it looks like the devil's MO in both the original and the remake is to look for the really desperate ones - those who won't be grasping at every straw to save their souls since they've got little to live for to begin with. Stanley in the original didn't even try to argue about the "stolen" wish despite any such clause being most probably absent from the contract (it looks like Stanley did read it in whole - it's not nearly as long in the original - yet was totally taken by surprise when he suddenly ran out of wishes, and no clause of the contract was ever brought up as an argument by the devil).
  • She agreed to provide seven wishes. She never said "seven wishes from now on."
  • It was probably all in the contract, but being that you could probably kill an elephant with it, nobody bothers to read it.