Evan Almighty
This entry was posted on 6/22/2007 3:20 PM and is filed under Film Reviews.
A spin-off of 2003’s $480 million worldwide hit
Bruce Almighty,
Evan Almighty has as its lead certainly one of the hottest comedy stars working today in the form of
Steve Carell, of television's
The Office. Still, even filtered through the more forgiving lens of PG-dom, and giving its mash-up narrative conceit (part
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, part Noah’s arc bible story) a hall pass,
Evan Almighty
is a dispiritingly timid comedy of laid-track laffs.
I say “laffs”
instead of “laughs” because
there’s so little that’s either surprising
or even genuine about this movie — it feels phony, in a rib-nudging
sort of way, almost bizarrely, purposefully false. From every pore
Evan Almighty exudes the feel of a meticulously corporate-vetted tale, and one so
nakedly designed to radiate broad appeal that it ends up being a bore —
and a rather predictable bore, at that.
From almost the get-go, Evan Almighty feels like the wrong choice for a spin-off to Bruce Almighty,
just in terms of the story and where it’s taken. The smug, pompous Evan
Baxter of the first film — a cameo bit player who finds himself the
unknowing recipient of frustrated colleague Jim Carrey’s
passive-aggressiveness — is completely gone, replaced with
a
generic-type sitcom dad, struggling to please the wife and kids with
family time. Robbed of the comedic tension and opportunities that an erosion of this self-importance
would provide,
the movie becomes an exercise in visually tricked-out
tedium. When
Evan Almighty dips into its obligatory music montage of arc-building mishaps, Carell hits his thumb with a hammer not once, not twice… but
three times, because, you know, comedy comes in triplicate.
For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
