Evan Almighty

Starring: Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham, Johnny Simmons, Graha Phillips, Jimmy Bennett, John Goodman, Molly Shannon

Written by: Steve Oedekerk, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow

Directed by: Tom Shadyac

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Rated: PG

As big-budget summer comedies go, Evan Almighty is a strange mutation. The standard Hollywood plot formula is forced into an ecological family eco-comedy based on a story from the Old Testament. Mixing moral themes, it’s a largely inoffensive film about the importance of love, family and conservation. While it’s a vaguely pleasant trip to the multiplex, Evan Almighty misses so many opportunities for truly progressive comedy that it comes across as being almost offensively safe.

Steve Carell stars as Evan Baxter, a TV news anchor who has been elected to Congress. He, his wife (Lauren Graham) and three boys move off to a big house in an upscale subdivision. Just as Baxter and his family are getting acclimated to the new life, God (Morgan Freeman) comes along and asks Evan to build an ark. At first, Baxter ignores God’s request, dismissing him as a crazy person. When animals start following him around in pairs, Evan begins to believe and trust in God’s plan for him. Soon, Evan is dressing like a biblical character and eating unleavened bread (pita).

Written by Steve Oedekerk (Kung Pow, Bruce Almighty) the story doesn’t follow the original tale of Noah and the Ark very closely. As Evan begins to have faith in God’s plan for him, that faith is tested numerous times. He risks losing his family, his job and a great deal of dignity in the process of completing work on the boat. In this respect, Evan Almighty feels very much like Neil Simon’s early ‘70s stage play God’s Favorite – a modern day comedy based on the book of Job. The underlying message here is to never lose faith, even when everything around you is falling apart.

Mixing ecology in with a story about blindly following one’s predetermined path feels far too uncomfortable a mix to make a truly great comedy. However, in its best moments, Evan Almighty is a surprisingly innocuous 90 minutes. The huge Hollywood machinery behind a film with a production budget in the neighborhood of $175 million doesn’t have to drive out creativity, but it usually doesn’t help. Steve Carrel (The Forty Year Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine) has shown incredible comic instincts in the past. Here, they’re crushed underneath the weight of the production. Similarly, Lauren Graham (The Gilmore Girls, Bad Santa) has shown impressive comedic dexterity in previous roles, yet here she’s given little more to do than play June Cleaver to a man who she thinks is having a nervous breakdown. Two or three times a year, Morgan Freeman makes an appearance in a really bad or mediocre film and manages to improve it merely by walking into frame and uttering a few lines. After nearly 10 years of doing this (remember 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves?) the alchemy of Freeman’s charisma has become kind of a cheap trick, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. Morgan Freeman has the kind of irrepressibly entertaining screen presence that works in just about any role.

Evan Almighty’s special effects largely consist of filling the screen with pairs of animals. This is a lot more impressive than it sounds, as director Tom Shadyac’s lens continually pans over cleverly placed animals. It all looks cute, if a bit creepy and unnatural to see so many animals out of their natural habitat lounging around until the ark is built. Having directed nearly every major Jim Carey film to date, Shadyac is no stranger to making the creepy and unnatural palatable to the movie going public. Evan Almighty joins such previous Shadyac hits as Bruce Almighty, Liar, Liar and, yes Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. VS