Now With Less Bruce

Ginger and I watched Evan Almighty the other night. I had to twist Ginger's arm to watch since she thought it was going to be poking fun at religious people / ideas. After I told her that this was a sequel to Bruce Almighty, which I thought had done a decent job of not poking fun in that sense, and that this would probably be along the same lines she reluctantly agreed to watch it (and luckily I was right in my assessment). The movie is about Evan Baxter (the rival newsman from Bruce Almighty) as a newly elected Congressman that gets told by God to build an ark. I should add that even though this is a sequel to Bruce Almighty, Bruce makes no appearance.

The movie did decent numbers at the box office pulling in 100 million domestic and 69 million overseas. Too bad the production budget was 175 million (most expensive comedy movie ever made). And I have to say, when I first started watching the movie, I was having a hard time seeing where the 175 million went, but if you watch the bonus features that describe how they had more animals in this movie than any other, and each animal had a trainer that had to be on hand for shoots, and how many shots certain scenes took, and how the movie tried to be green and leave no carbon footprint (by doing things like buying everyone involved that wanted one a bike and donating all the leftover wood to habitat for humanity) and then you realize how much stuff was green screened. Well at that point I suppose I can see where they blew 175 million (that still seems like an awful lot of money, but I guess I'm just numb to totals like this these days). I will say that the movie's green goal translates into a secondary theme in the movie since it does try to (oh so subtly) promote the idea being green and conserving energy and resources.

How's the movie itself? Well, it's not the funniest movie I've seen, but it's not the worst either. Had a fair number of chuckles in it and couple of laugh out loud spots (for me anyway). Overall, pretty average (for the record I believe Ginger's opinion was along the lines of "It was okay"). The movie can feel a bit preachy at times, but given the subject matter I would have been surprised if that hadn't been the case. I wasn't thrilled with the big reveal at the end (for some reason I have my doubts that the old testament was written in English originally). And I don't even want to get into the whole action ending and the sheer impossibility of it (it probably works better if you don't know anything about downtown DC and the mall I'm guessing). Overall an amusing movie, it does a decent job at providing a couple of laughs in 90 minutes allocated.