Evan Almighty (**)

About twenty years ago, there was a comedy called Ishtar that was famous for costing about $55 million and making much less. Nowadays, people have gotten use to enormous sums being spent making movies, and so word that this is supposedly the costliest comedy ever made, once something a studio might have tried to hush, becomes something like a selling point. But it remains true that a hundred million dollars worth of effects won’t save a $29.95 script. That’s not literally what we have here, of course. Actually, a bundle was spent on a script, and that script was junked and rewritten by Steve Oedekerk, who turned it into a sequel to a 2003 hit he’d helped to write. It may be because the original script wasn’t supposed to be a sequel that this doesn’t feel much like Bruce Almighty, the Jim Carrey comedy.

Notwithstanding the title, Evan Baxter (Steve Carrell) doesn’t get to play God as Bruce did. God, again played with a wry approachability by Morgan Freeman, forces Evan to play Noah. Whereas Bruce was somewhat driven by the on-edge personality of its star, Evan is a blander creation, a career-driven husband and father with too little time. In other words, he’s the same character as the fathers in three quarters of the Hollywood “family” movies in the last ten years, not unlike the Cheaper by the Dozen remake, whose screenwriters helped out Oedekerk this time around. The movie also reminded me in a way of Signs, where God apparently lets aliens kill millions of people just so Mel Gibson can regain his faith. Here, the suggestion is that a devastating flood is just the thing to give Evan the opportunity to become closer to his wife (Lauren Graham) and three sons. God hates seeing the breakup of the wealthy suburban family.

Right off the bat, things look dodgy as Evan, the anchorman seen briefly in Bruce Almighty, bids viewers and Buffalo farewell to begin his new job as a US congressman. Let me get this straight. He’s been allowed to do the news during and after his campaign? Okay, it’s a point that can be overlooked in a comedy, but the movie is full of them. Later, Evan wakes up one morning with a scraggly beard that instantly grows back when he shaves; his unusual appearance is one thing that compels him to admit to his wife that he’s spoken to God, but she’s skeptical. Now, if you were Evan, what would you do to prove there’s been some divine madness? Shave in front of her, right? But Evan doesn’t do this.

Evan even gets its theology wrong. Running away from his record like a presidential candidate, the Freeman version of the Deity tells Evan that, when He decided to “destroy all flesh,” as the trusty King James puts it, with the first great flood, He wasn’t angry. Whereas Bruce Almighty made a valiant stab at explaining why there was unhappiness on earth, Evan just raises new questions, like, why does God always choose to look like Morgan Freeman? Oedekerk and director Tom Shadyc seem to want to soften God’s rough edges for a family audience, for this is much the family movie compared to its sarcastic predecessor. Typically, this means there’s a lot of jokes centered around various animal expulsions. When not directed at Evan, these land on the closest thing to a Devil character, a congressman (John Goodman) who wants Evan to cosponsor a bill to open up federal lands for development. We don’t get to find out if God (or Evan) is a Republican or a Democrat, but he definitely doesn’t dig suburban sprawl.

Subtract the poop jokes and the hairiness jokes and the jokes about all the animals mysteriously following Evan around and there’s not much to recommend this as a comedy. Wanda Sykes gets the most laughs as Evan’s congressional aide. The lapses in logic ruin it as a fantasy movie, too. I’m not sure if all million-plus animal species are represented on Evan’s ark, but it doesn’t matter, as their major purpose would seem to be those poop jokes. In terms of the story, their presence turns out to be almost entirely superfluous.

As for all the money, it isn’t entirely wasted. The producers really built a biblical-scale ark, and it was admittedly a miraculous thing to watch it flow through the flooded mall in downtown Washington, DC. Thus, a not-funny cookie-cutter comedy with a heavy-handed environmental message and six really cool minutes. Be sure to look for those six minutes on cable. On the whole, though, I’d rather watch Ishtar.

IMDB link