Evan Almighty - out now
Directed by Tom Shadyac (Ace Ventura, The Nutty Professor), this sequel to Bruce Almighty at $135 million dollars is purportedly the most expensive comedy ever filmed. Steve Carell plays a newscaster turned politician who has uprooted to Virginia, dragging a reluctant wife and three boys with him to support him in his ambitions. His campaign pledge to “change the world” becomes a reality when God, in the form of an avuncular Morgan Freeman, tells him to build an ark to save America from a great flood. In spite of hints at an environmental message – the flood after all followed a controversial decision to privatise a national park – Evan’s penchant for gas-guzzling 4×4s makes him an unlikely eco-warrior.
Carell rose quickly to fame playing awkward characters in the American version of The Office and The 40 Year Old Virgin. Here all traces of dry irony have been displaced by a spectacularly bland script which relies on bum gags and racial stereotypes for laughs, and you are left wondering how a comedy A-lister such as Carell ended up leading in such a second-rate film. Nonetheless, Carell proves to be adept at slapstick, sustaining any number of ark-related injuries. Evan’s sarcastic secretary played by Wanda Sykes and fellow politician John Goodman just about hold the script together, but essentially the film lacks any momentum. Far too much time is spent on cheap gags, such as Evan’s ponytail beard (referring to the Noah of old) that springs from nowhere, or the way he is constantly trimming his nasal hair.
Meanwhile Morgan Freeman’s jocular God has a theology that revolves purely around being nice to everyone. You long for the omnipotent Old Testament Jehovah to step in and destroy this ridiculously over-budgeted mess of a movie. Most of the money was spent on the animals, which follow Evan around two-by-two, and on huge special effects, but this does nothing to detract from the lazy, formulaic screenplay.
The story of a modern-day Noah had a lot of potential. The environmental theme could have been explored in far more depth, with films like An Inconvenient Truth highlighting the effects of global warming; the parochialism of small-town America could have been set against the ambition of a narcissistic journo. Sadly though Shadyac opts for slapstick over satire, leaving us with nothing more than bland light-heartedness.
