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A Universal release; written by Steve Koren, Mark O'Keefe and Steve Oedekerk; directed by Tom Shadyac; starring Jim Carrey and Jennifer Aniston. Released to DVD on November 25, 2003.  Walking out of the screening room of Bruce Almighty, I felt a trifle stupid. It's not the type of thing you wish to announce to anyone--I couldn't follow the plot of a Tom Shadyac movie--but, nonetheless, it was true. There were huge holes in the middle of Shadyac's comedy that I couldn't understand. Large, massive, phenomenally big gaps as though the projectionist simply forgot to play the fourth reel. So I saw Bruce Almighty a second time, convinced I must have forgotten something or just missed something during my initial viewing. I didn't. There were no plausible explanations for a large number of the character actions on-screen. People would be fighting for no apparent reason, parties would be taking place for no apparent reason and events seemed to occur for no apparent reason. It made so little sense to me that I didn't feel I could write a plausible review of the movie. Six months later, I got a copy of the Bruce Almighty DVD that contained nearly 40 minutes of deleted scenes and after viewing them everything began to fall into place. No wonder I hadn't been able to understand what was going on; nearly every scene that moved the plot forward had been cut to make room for more of lead actor Jim Carrey's comic mugging and extremely sentimental drippiness. Carrey stars in Bruce Almighty as Bruce Nolan, Buffalo, New York's own wacky TV reporter. Think of L.A. Story's Harris Tellemacher with less class and dignity. After a particularly bad week on the job, getting passed over for a promotion, getting robbed, crashing his car and having his dog pee on his couch repeatedly, Bruce has had enough. He tells God what a terrible job he is doing and challenges him. Having nothing else better to do (and being ready for a vacation), God (Morgan Freeman) comes down to Earth and gives Bruce his powers in order to show him how hard it is to be God. Bruce makes the most of this opportunity and teaches his dog how to pee into the toilet standing up, creates an "anal dwelling butt monkey", and gives his girlfriend, Grace (Jennifer Aniston) bigger breasts. Bruce Almighty is a bad film. It's edited extremely poorly (Shadyac even refers to himself as "Shady-hack" on the DVD) and it's pacing suffers immensely because of this. The premise itself seems like a near perfect comedy premise--Jim Carrey is given God's powers for a week--so Shadyac's decision to constantly return his camera to document the unfunny, hackneyed and maudlin emotional moments in Bruce's life was unforgivable.  That no one ever bothered to explain (even in the deleted scenes) why a financially comfortable man in his early 40's who has all his hair, lives in a nice part of town with Jennifer Aniston and is a local celebrity could ever have the temerity to question God's plan for him is almost as poor a choice as Shadyac's focus. The fact that a film whose deleted scenes were better than the final product was released to theatres grossed roughly $250 million is cause enough to wonder if there is in fact a God. | |||||
