BRUCE ALMIGHTY

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, May 23, 2003

There is a good comedy premise in BRUCE ALMIGHTY, in which a decent fellow gets nearly infinite power and the responsibility that comes with it. It is in many ways ideal for the talents of Jim Carrey, who certainly has some stellar moments here. However...

Carrey plays Bruce Nolan, a relatively nice guy who has been shacked up with loyal and patient (and moderately religious) girlfriend Grace Connelly (Jennifer Aniston) for five years now. Bruce is a TV reporter for a local Buffalo, NY station who gets all the wacky stories, while coveting the anchor slot so badly that when he doesn't get it, he comes unglued on the air. Bemoaning the unfairness of his lot in life, and the incompetence of a Supreme Being who would allow these things to befall him, Bruce is summoned to a mysterious meeting in a seemingly empty building, where he meets God (Morgan Freeman). After deftly overcoming Bruce's initial incredulity, God announces that He is going on vacation and Bruce will fill in for him. Bruce is at first terrified by the situation, but quickly comes to enjoy the ability to make his whims come true. There is the matter of dealing with answering prayers, but Bruce thinks he's found a tidy solution to it. Alas, he's still not very good at paying attention to Grace's needs...

While it's not

good form for a film reviewer to complain about plot threads not followed, the script by Steve Koren & Mark O'Keefe & Steve Oedekerk, from a story by Koren & O'Keefe, really begs a lot of issues. On the one hand, BRUCE ALMIGHTY is intended as a romp, but on the other, they keep getting serious in weird places. Freeman as God actually delivers a lecture on self-sufficiency (including an admonition for teenagers to stay off drugs) if you're going to have a lecture (or pretty much anything else) delivered, Freeman can be depended on to do it as well as is possible, but if the movie is going to be throwing moral anvils around, what are we to make of Bruce's antics? He drops a meteor in order to get a news story, which results in flooding elsewhere in the world, which in turn creates the quite curious message that apparently God is more interested in teaching Bruce a lesson than He is in the lives of thousands of people affected by the temporary deity's whims.

The film also brings up the matter of dealing with prayers, only to handle the issue as lightly as possible. When Bruce starts granting wishes wholesale, the troublesome results revolve around lottery tickets. His big dramatic conflict stems from problems with Grace, which have less to do with Bruce's divine powers than with standard romantic comedy boy/girl stuff, so that by the time all the story elements are brought together, they feel cobbled together rather than parts of a cohesive whole.

Director Tom Shadyac knows how to utilize Carrey's timing for maximum comedic effect and it's very possible BRUCE ALMIGHTY will do well at the box office, because parts of it are very funny. However, the film strives to be at once outrageous, profound and inoffensive, and that's a hat trick it doesn't have the magic to pull off.

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