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Trailer for "Evan Almighty"

I am very disappointed in Steve Carell.

I can’t say that I necessarily blame him: The Peter Principle, which asserts that “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence,” applies to Hollywood as well as the business world. The thinking (if we may use the term loosely) would go that because Carell has been so funny in supporting roles on television and movies, as well as in leading roles in the off-center TV series The Office and film The 40 Year Old Virgin, he’ll make a swell leading man in mainstream comedies, right?

Wrong. I don’t want to begrudge him stardom and the accoutrements of fame. But if Hollywood is going to put him in vehicles as dumb as Evan Almighty, where his part could as easily have been played by any of the dozens of vacant-eyed actors populating our screens these days—well, then what’s the point?

And make no mistake about it: From the opening scenes, this is a movie that has utterly no faith in the intelligence of its audience. It’s a sort-of sequel to Bruce Almighty, in which Supreme Being Morgan Freeman gave infinite powers to Jim Carrey just to prove how hard it was to be God. That film, as you would expect from a Carrey vehicle, had a raunchy edge, enough to get it an R rating. Evan Almighty, on the other hand, has to stretch for its PG-13. It is made at least in part (how large a part I will leave to others to decide) for an avowedly Christian audience, one that places some credence in the biblical story of Noah and would therefore have an interest in seeing it moved to modern times.

That the movie has an environmental theme (God’s plan this time, and I’m not giving away anything here, is to mount a protest to the despoliation of his creation) can be seen as a canny bit of audience marketing by the filmmakers: Recent polls indicate that evangelicals are learning to embrace the green movement.

If that is the demographic this film is aimed at, though, it’s hard not to view this as evidence that Hollywood considers evangelicals to be—well, dumb. I’ll even grant them that if you’re going to make a movie about a supernatural deity interacting with humans, it’s going to have to make some large leaps of faith and ask you not to question some things too much. Fine.

But any middle-schooler has a better grasp on the way the world operates than this script. It moves the story from Buffalo (thank God) to Washington, which is depicted as a place run essentially for his own benefit by one senator (John Goodman, looking properly embarrassed to the level to which his career has sunk) (and yes, that includes Normal, Ohio). It presents the national media as a circus in a caricature at which even the loudest of left-wing critics would cringe. And it wastes your time and attention on a celestial scheme so half-witted that Jehovah should sue.

There is of course the possibility that everything about the plot of Evan Almighty is mere window dressing for a special effects display. You have doubtless heard that this is the most expensive comedy ever made, having cost at least $175 million. If that is the case, I must cry, Show me the money! Because it sure isn’t onscreen. The film does have lots of animals, true. I believe they work for somewhat less than union scale. The ark, which in repose is nearly full-sized, is impressive, and carpenters do earn top dollar. But the big finale, when the special effects guys get to earn their paychecks, looks exactly like a CGI sequence, and a sterile one at that.

Throughout, Carell gets to do nothing particularly funny beyond a dance he seems to have stolen from those local hardware store ads (you’ll recognize it, trust me). It’s all rather less sophisticated than the Oh, God! movies of the 1970s, featuring George Burns as a mild-mannered deity trying to gently nudge people into paying attention to him again. If Evan Almighty represents Hollywood’s attempt to cater to traditionalist Christians (or whatever you want to call them), it couldn’t possibly be any more condescending.