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Evan Almighty

The movie of the summer for the timid Christian paranoiacs

By MICHAEL ATKINSON | June 20, 2007

1.5 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for Evan Almighty.

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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