What in heaven is going on with “Evan Almighty”?
This big summer comedy is verily one of the oddest movies of the year.
It’s a spin-off of the 2003 Jim Carrey movie “Bruce Almighty,” but without Carrey. Instead, it plucks a minor character from that movie – a vain news broadcaster played by Steve Carell – and uses absolutely nothing else.
OK, it does bring back God, in the form of Morgan Freeman. But in every other way, it’s a very different kind of film. Even Steve Carell’s character is quite altered in this one.
For one thing, in “Bruce Almighty” Carell was funny. In “Evan Almighty,” Carell is actually something of a straight man, even though he does a few wacky dance moves and executes some pratfalls.
Seems Carell’s character, Evan Baxter, has morphed into a new person: once a bumbling broadcaster, he’s now an idealistic freshman congressman, with a wife (Lauren Graham) and three sons.
We’ll make this as quick as possible: God comes to Evan, tells him to build a giant ark, and wait for the rain. As Evan reluctantly sets to this task, animals come to him (two-by-two, naturally) and his beard and hair grow of their own accord. Biblically, you might say.
Very early in this film, you realize that director Tom Shadyac (returning from “Bruce”) and screenwriter Bob Oedekerk want us to take this seriously. Yes, there are laughs when birds poop on Evan in the Capitol building, and kids will giggle when Evan tries to shave his beard and it keeps growing back in seconds.
In the supporting ranks, Carell’s aides have some good one-liners; they’re played by Wanda Sykes, John Michael Higgins and Jonah Hill. John Goodman provides the evil, corrupt congressman role.
But “Evan Almighty” is both sincere in its religious conviction and its ecological message. If the next big political movement is, as pundits rumor, Christian evangelicals adopting the environmental cause, then “Evan Almighty” is their movie.
As good as Carell is at playing clueless boobs, he’s actually capable of earnestness (some of the best things in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” were his moments of sweetness). But the movie makes a huge mistake in cleaning up his “Bruce Almighty” character. Now he’s just a bland nice guy, whose only real flaw is working so hard he neglects his kids. That leaves his transformation lacking oomph.
The movie’s biggest problem is reconciling its Capraesque political tale with the supernatural. It’s not giving anything away to report that the flood eventually comes, and Evan’s ark goes seaborne. What’s weird is that the movie’s big special-effects scene looks like it belongs in a different movie, and that the cataclysm it describes would have killed thousands of people in the nation’s capitol.
But the film blithely sidesteps that point. Instead, we’re in la-la land, where unbelievable things – even by the measure of a film fantasy – happen on a regular basis. As a result, I jumped ship early on.
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