Evan Almighty

Rating:	★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

I honestly didn’t know what to expect before I watched “Evan Almighty”. I knew it was the sequel to “Bruce Almighty”, the same movie that basically launched Steve Carell’s movie career, and that Morgan Freeman and Carell were returning to their roles, but that was about it. The trailers featured Evan Baxter (Carell) growing a beard and building an ark because God (Freeman) told him of a coming flood. However, I heard bad reviews concerning the film and that it bombed in the US. Still, Jo and I were curious enough that we decided to give this movie a shot.

News anchorman Evan Baxter just won a seat in Congress. He uproots his whole family to a nice area in Virginia and gets a cushy new office thanks to Cong. Long (John Goodman). His life is thrown for a loop when God appears (like he did to Jim Carrey’s Bruce in the first film) and tells Evan that he must build an ark. No matter how he resists, Evan is forced by God to build the ark even as pairs of animals begin gravitating toward him and his family slowly move away from him. Eventually completing the ark and getting his family back, Evan prepares for the coming flood even as Cong. Long is revealed to have cut costs in building a nearby dam.

This film was weird. That’s the consensus Jo and I came up with after we watched it. I mean, it wasn’t as horrible as the reviews I had heard, but it wasn’t great either. With its large number of special effects, it is best seen on the big screen, but I have a hard time justifying paying P180 to catch it in a cinema. All in all, Jo and I agreed that it was “just okay”, and was probably wrongly advertised as a straight up comedy.

I remain a fan of Steve Carell despite this film and we’re still Morgan Freeman fans, it’s just that the film lacks a certain oomph required of a film to get us to really, really endorse it. I get that there are certain parts that were a bit preachy and a bit too religious, they were necessary for the film’s plot. But there were times where I kind of felt like the “God” character of Freeman was a bit too insensitive to Evan’s plight to the point of forcing him to build the ark and effectively rendering him impotent at work. Wanda Sykes, John Michael Higgins, and Jonah Hill give a few funny lines as Evan’s staff members but they weren’t particularly memorable. In fact it was Carell’s “The Office” co-star Ed Helms who stole the most scenes with his newscaster Ed Carson character.

When “Evan Almighty” had finished and Jo and I were leaving the cinema, we agreed that it was a weird film. A day after, we still couldn’t agree on a better term for this film other than “weird”. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not a great thing either.