With EVAN ALMIGHTY, the sorta, kinda, not exactly sequel to BRUCE ALMIGHTY, we learn that treacle is neither better nor worse than puerile. It’s a lateral move and they are both annoying. Jim Carrey, the Bruce of the previous film, opted out of the sequel, and so the powers-that-be turned to Steve Carell’s character, the boorish news anchorman Evan Baxter to step up to the plate. In theory, a good move. On his most mediocre day, Carell runs rings around Carrey’s best. Plus, he’s come into his own, raking in applause and kudos for THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN. But, as things often go, something went very wrong. Carell is still funny, but he’s light-years above the material handed to him. Ditto Morgan Freeman, who returns as God, the role his voice was born to play, bringing Freeman along for lagniappe.
It’s not the change of venue that stops the comedy in its tracks. Evan has been elected to Congress and, you’ll pardon the expression, God knows that’s a place rife with comedic possibilities, even in real life. It’s not even the change in premise. Evan doesn’t become the Almighty, title notwithstanding, no, God commands Evan to build an ark because of the flood that’s coming. Still promising. A man building something that big and ungainly in a spiffy new subdivision, that could work. Animals gathering menacingly, two-by-two, still got a lot of promise there. Creatures great, small, and outside their ecological niche, dogging, again, you’ll pardon the expression, Evan’s every step so that at any moment he might be leading a gaggle of wildlife in the halls of Congress or down a highway Why not?.
No, where this ungainly morass of flick, the most expensive comedy ever made, went south was when it decided to take itself very, very seriously. You see the oxymoron. I see the oxymoron. The three-year-old sitting next to us in the theater waiting to be entertained, he and/or she sees the oxymoron. The people in charge of the money, not so much. They did, however, think that going for that three-year-old would be a good idea, but instead of something clever, in the classic mistake when making a kid’s film, they bland-ed things up while dumbing everything down. Instead of the prurient nonsense of expanding boobs, we get bird-poop jokes. Lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them. And that brings up another problem. If Carell makes something funny once, and he often does, the film then repeats the SAME GAG over and over again until it’s not funny anymore, just annoying and vaguely embarrassing. As for the miraculous growth of a long beard and hair-do that renders Evan Noah-like, that’s been done before, and better. It was called THE SANTA CLAUS.
Carell, a man with a finely honed sense of the absurd that plays well on its own terms is lost in a film hyperbolic in its enthusiasm for the really big special effects and committed to the idea that too much as a concept constitutes funny. There is a moment when Carell’s character sits in front of an aquarium and is unnerved by the way that the fish all school at him. He’s even more unnerved by the idea that the powerful politico with whom he is attempting to curry favor might notice their rapt attention. It’s a small jewel of a performance that relies on timing and keen understanding of how human beings operate, or don’t, under pressure. Fast forward to the ark, and the inevitable overkill of special effects with Carell riding herd on them and the delicacy Carell’s talent is overwhelmed. At that point, the part could just as well have been played by an action figure.
EVAN ALMIGHTY has lost the anarchic sense of fun that the first film had, instead the focus is on the “message.” And that message is delivered with all the subtlety of the expanding boob joke of the original. This isn’t a movie, it’s a sermon, and a smug, condescending, tedious one at that.
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