If you are interested in seeing Mario Puzo hug Virginia Woolf with Ernest Hemmingway and Oscar Wilde sitting close by, try Shortcut to Happiness. There’s no other reason to watch the movie, made seven years ago and disowned last year by the film’s producer-director Alec Baldwin. Harry Kirkpatrick is now credited as the film’s director.

It’s quite incredible that when No Country For Old Men doesn’t release in Calcutta, something like Shortcut to Happiness finds its way through to the theatres. Perhaps the distributors thought India was a market where they could sell a bhuley-beesrey movie, another Faustian take on the Devil, female again, buying someone’s soul in exchange of a fixed period of success.What’s even more appalling is the presence of Anthony Hopkins in the cast. It’s quite difficult to imagine Hopkins delivering the final speech and you shifting in your seat waiting for it to get over. Shortcut to Happiness even manages that.

Hopkins is so uninterested in the proceedings that you feel sorry for him. He surely did the film for friend Baldwin.There’s the Devil herself — Jennifer Love Hewitt, nattily dressed as always, moving around in limos looking for lost souls. It suffices to say that a certain Liz Hurley was far more bedazzling and certainly worth selling your soul to. Poor little Hewitt is a whimper compared to Mrs Nayar. Fast forward buttons were made for Hewitt’s constant whining. Baldwin himself tries his best to infuse some method into the madness around him. As the writer whom no one reads and who agrees to the deal with the Devil to gain respect as an author, the man is totally believable. But everything around him is so soap opera and so caricaturish that even his best efforts look totally out of place.

It’s difficult to understand why someone like Baldwin would choose to retell the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benet, which is a retelling of the original Faust myth, in this fashion. The story had inspired another Hollywood film in 1941. (But then the world was a different place in 2001, when the film was shot.) There are really very few redeeming features in the film even though the producers would like you to believe it is some kind of a corollary to that brilliant Will Smith film Pursuit of Happyness. Perhaps the best thing about it is its length, just around 90 minutes. Even then a couple of college kids, who must have got lured into the Friday morning show because of Hewitt’s name, were grumbling how they lost two days in the whole ordeal.Watch Shortcut to Happiness at your own risk. If you find yourself in the theatre till the end, do watch that incredible frame of the world’s greatest writers sitting in as jury on the Devil versus Daniel Webster court case. It’s simply hilarious, even if it is unintentionally so.