The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
 
Features  |  Reviews
Best2012Vote-1000x50

Evan Almighty

The movie of the summer for the timid Christian paranoiacs
By MICHAEL ATKINSON  |  June 20, 2007
1.5 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.”
Related: The girls of summer, The Bucket List, Review: Invictus, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Movie Stars,  More more >
| More

 Friends' Activity   Popular   Most Viewed 
[ 02/14 ]   The Addams Family  @ Shubert Theatre
[ 02/14 ]   "Aphrodite and the Gods of Love"  @ Museum of Fine Arts
[ 02/14 ]   "Processes and Dreams"  @ Panopticon Gallery
ARTICLES BY MICHAEL ATKINSON
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   REVIEW: YOU ARE ALL CAPTAINS  |  November 08, 2011
    A sublime meta-fictional trifle that evokes Abbas Kiarostami's '90s mirror-films of children, Oliver Laxe's jaunt lands in a semi-rural Moroccan school for orphans.
  •   REVIEW: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN  |  November 02, 2011
    Made as a communal experiment, the film is an avalanche of amateur avant-garde hijinks, closer to Brakhage and Markopoulos than to Hollywood.
  •   REVIEW: STRAW DOGS  |  September 20, 2011
    Remaking, polishing, and in effect housebreaking what should've remained untamed and feral, Rod Lurie's new version of the Peckinpah classic follows the original's story beats closely, and so the devil is in the details.
  •   REVIEW: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MCKINLEY NOLAN  |  August 30, 2011
    An investigative doc brimming with cultural resonance and historical savvy, Henry Corra's film has ahold of a pungent story — that of the titular black Texan fella who vanished in Vietnam 40 years ago.
  •   BUÑUEL CONTINUES TO DELIGHT, CONFOUND, AND SHOCK  |  June 16, 2011
    Openly, contentedly delighted with how our own dreams can appall us, and how close movies are to that appalling dreaminess, Luis Buñuel — the subject of an extensive survey at the HFA this month — may have been the greatest filmmaker of the medium's first century.

 See all articles by: MICHAEL ATKINSON

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed