Evan AlmightyThe movie of the summer for the timid Christian paranoiacs  June 20,
2007 12:00:12 PM
VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Evan Almighty.
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Finally, the 21st-century redo of the Oh, God! franchise we’ve all been asking for, after a fashion — and the movie of the summer for the timid Christian paranoiacs of Middle America who think that Pirates of the Caribbean is too pagan for their Bible-thumped grade-schoolers. For everyone else, Tom Shadyac’s sequel to the lackluster Jim Carrey homily should be as indigestible as prechewed holiday ham. We pick up with TV newsworm-turned-congressman Evan Baxter (Steve Carell), who’s been chosen by Morgan Freeman’s crinkly, Benetton-outfitted Godhead to be the new Noah — and, yes, the prospect of big-death Apocalypse spreads an odd and unfunny gloom over the head-trauma slapstick and non-stop bird-crap jokes. (Only Wanda Sykes, as the movie’s obligatory reaction-shot deadpanner, exhibits a functioning wit.) If the treacly, Reagan-era-style piety and angel choruses don’t sour your gut, the Biblical ignorance may — the Sunday-school field-trip chaperones will have a devil of a time explaining how the Great Flood was, in Freeman’s feel-good words, “a love story.”
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Three-hour Egyptian epic
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Shohei Imamura at the HFA
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The 19th annual Boston Jewish Film Festival
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Contemporary Romanian cinema at the HFA
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The big ideas get out, despite clumsy dialogue
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Art-love tunnel vision
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Hormones submit to dreary Order
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No wave in sight at the Boston French Film Festival
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Yet another mismatched-buddy pairing
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- Unintentional laughs
- A step ahead of the rest
- Too many weird gimmicks
- Religious groups and the environment
- A rich kid on the road to comeuppance
- A shambling charmer
- Revisit one of the great films about the artistic process
- Seraphim in France
- Poignant enough
- An 88-minute flop
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