Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Western Film mini movie review - Evan Almighty


When I first heard about this movie I thought it sounded cool. It's a semi sequel to Bruce Almighty in which God as played by Morgan Freeman gives his powers to Bruce as played by Jim Carrey. Steve Carell played a small part of Evan in that movie and plays the lead in this one. Morgan Freeman plays God again and commands Evan to build an Ark.

Originally I had expected something adult oriented like the first one, as time went by it turned out Universal had dumbed it down to get to the family market and played up the religious aspects. It was a stupid thing to do.

I enjoyed it well enough but it was mostly just there. It had fun moments and by the end made sense. It's the most expensive comedy ever made ($175 million) and I can see where the money went. There's a lot of effects involving animals, surprisingly, for that amount of money the effects are often fairly obvious.

I can't help but wonder where this could have gone if they had maintained an adult mentality similar to Bruce. Steve Carell is mostly known for The 40 year Old Virgin. His fans won't find the same kind of humour here and the family audiences won't know who he is. I thought making bland family comedies is what old comedians do when they aren't funny any more. I'm looking at you Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams.

The other actors were funny, especially Wanda Sykes. The other characters in the film were also really frustrating, straining suspension of disbelief to the limit. This guy is being followed around by two each of hundreds of kinds of animals including lions and elephants and they think he is just going crazy or having a mid-life crisis?!

This review probably sounds more negative than I mean it to. The movie was fun and fairly funny. Still worth $4.24 if you get my drift.


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