Bruce Almighty

Tom Shadyac directs a 101-minute comedy from a script by Steve Koren, Mark O’Keefe and Steve Oedekerk whose idea is about as large as ideas get: a self-pitying man is given everything God can do. The film spends roughly thirty minutes having fun with that and the remaining seventy backing away from it. It is amiable, it is sometimes properly funny, and it is frightened of its own premise from the moment the premise arrives.

The early stretch belongs to Carrey and it is the best of the film. His live report from Niagara Falls, a puff piece that curdles on air into a tirade against his own station, is the kind of slow-motion self-destruction he does better than anyone, and Scott Hill holds the takes long enough that we watch the smile give way one muscle at a time. Once the powers come, he parts a bowl of tomato soup with a finger, teaches the dog to use the lavatory and pulls the moon in closer for a date. We laughed, properly and more than once, mostly at the soup, because Carrey plays it not as a miracle but as a man checking whether the trick works.

Morgan Freeman plays God as a janitor with a mop and then as a man in a white suit who finds all of this mildly amusing. Linda DeScenna gives him a bare white-floored building with nothing in it but a bucket and a filing cabinet, Judy L. Ruskin dresses him like a retired bandleader, and Freeman does the rest by declining to raise his voice. Every scene he is in is calmer and sharper than the scenes around it. Steve Carell, as the smug rival Evan Baxter, has one live news bulletin in which Bruce arranges for his voice to stop obeying him, and Carell plays the mounting panic dead straight. It is the biggest laugh in the film and it does not involve Carrey.

The trouble is what the script does with omnipotence, which is very little. Bruce finds parking spaces, settles scores, improves his love life and gets his job back. That is a fair opening move; it turns out to be the only move. In H.G. Wells’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles, from 1936, a shop clerk given the same gift very nearly wrecks the world. Here nothing Bruce does costs anything at all until the writers decide it is time for a lesson, at which point everything does, and the film turns into a homily about not bothering God with requests. We were bored by the last half hour, and then irritated by it, because a sermon that arrives that late is a film admitting it has stopped thinking.

Jennifer Aniston has the thankless job. Grace exists to be neglected, then wooed with special effects, then neglected again, and the script uses her as a gauge of Bruce’s moral progress rather than as a person. Aniston gives her more warmth than the writing deserves. Dean Semler shoots Buffalo in bright, flat, sitcom light, blue skies and yellow kitchens, which suits the gags and does nothing for the heavenly bits, and John Debney’s score tells you a moral is coming about ten seconds before it does. Philip Baker Hall, as the boss, gets to be gruff twice.

Shadyac and Carrey made Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Liar Liar together, and Liar Liar had a rule it believed in: a man who cannot lie for one day, and every scene tests it. This film has a far bigger rule and does not trust it. The reviews so far are split down the middle, and we are in the middle with them, which is a dull place to be about a film in which a man rearranges the moon.

If the household likes Carrey pulling faces, the first hour and the 12 certificate will see you through a Friday night. After that you may find yourself talking over it, and the film will not mind.