Evan Almighty

2007 comedy

Rating: 9/20

Plot: New congressman Evan Baxter is harassed by God until he agrees to build an ark.

I was on a family vacation where we didn't have any free time at all. On our lone day off, I was flipping through channels, and this one was just beginning. I was starving for some movie entertainment, so I watched the entire thing.

There's a lengthy ark-building montage where Steve Carell, a guy I really do like, keeps falling down, hitting his thumb with antiquated hammers, and getting slapped in the balls with boards. I'm actually not sure I'm remembering that last part right. He might not actually suffer any testicular trauma in this movie, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he did because that's the sort of rich idea the writers (Steve Oedekerk is the name, but there are four other credited writers) and Pet Detective (and Patch Adams) director Tom Shadyac seem to think is comedy gold. That's not a complaint that this gets too crude or anything because it's not that type of movie at all. In fact, I think you could probably get away with showing it in church. And who knows? Maybe Trump supporters could be fooled into thinking it was based on a true story. So it's not crude humor; it's just unimaginative, bland humor, something that Steve Carell must have been attracted to mostly because he was getting paid lots of money to do it. It's the type of idea that seems like it could probably write itself, but not in a good way. Everything is so obvious and on the nose.

That includes a superficial attempt to attach some sort of environmental or political message to the whole thing. It's like Shadyac had to make this as part of a homework assignment, finished it all quickly, and then checked the assignment details or the grading rubric the teacher had provided and noticed that he had forgotten to add a universal theme, didn't think the whole "trust God" thing was strong enough, and tacked on the environmental stuff.

The modern-day Noah story could have maybe worked in my delicate hands, but this is Tom Shadyac and 2007, so Noah needs to be louder and the special effects need to be big. Note that I described them as big there, not as good. The animal stuff works in some cases, but at times, the CGI animals look ludicrous, and bad special effects during the climax are distracting.

I'm surprised this wasn't followed by Dale Almighty, a modern-day Abraham retelling where Morgan Freeman convinces Will Ferrell to kill his own son. That would be a hoot!

After this, Bruce Almighty came on. I'm not sure why the channel decided to show them in that order. By that time, I was getting ready to leave the hotel and couldn't pay much attention, but I did watch enough to be reminded that Jim Carrey, when he wanted to, was capable of singlehandedly ruining a movie with his acting.

I'm thinking of writing my own "Almighty" movie based on the story of Onan, the Old Testament's most notorious masturbator. Paul Rudd would be perfect in that!

The only other movie I was able to watch was Les Diaboliques. I already wrote about that movie right here and have nothing to add. It's better than both Evan Almighty and Bruce Almighty. We also saw Coco last night after we got back from our trip (my wife and Abbey's first times), and I have nothing to add to my thoughts about that one either. I did cry again though.