5.05.2008

At the Cardio Cinema: Evan Almighty

The old testament was never this much fun!
Movie: Evan Almighty (2007, full runtime 95 minutes)
Running length: 18 minutes, 3-minute cool down)

Review: Spoilers can and may follow and they will ruin the entire movie. Not much to spoil actually. If this were an indie called Bill and the Ark there might be question of whether or not there'd be an actual flood, but in a big budget Hollywood flick the movie hinges not only on having a flood, but making it supercool and CGIing the bejezus out of it. Also, God is apparently a big C+C Music Factory fan. The credits are painful...but as long as everyone was having fun I guess...

Plot: So there's a flood at the end. And I saw it. However, I found it only moderatecool. There's also some sort of political backstory that I didn't quite figure out. I'm pretty sure John Goodman and Molly Shannon were evil in some way.

Good: More folks I like getting paychecks. Wanda Sykes and John Michael Higgins play variations on the same characters they always play. I'm almost certain have a contract to be in the same movies with each other. Apparently they've inducted Jonah Hill and Ed Helms into the fold - they're also here doing the same thing they always do. It's scary too, because Jonah and Ed are a little too new to be doing a standard routine.

Also, if I were in first grade, I would almost certainly have loved this movie.

Bad: Maybe I'm thinking about it too much, but from what I saw the whole thing is just kind of weird. I never want to see Bruce Almighty, but were Bruce and Evan close? And wasn't that just a movie about a dude who uses God's power to look up girls' skirts? Is this a sequel? Is it supposed to have a religious subtext? Or is this just God reduced to a generic, nondenominational symbol of all-powerfulness? Why does Evan have three kids who basically look the same and do nothing? Couldn't they just have had one kid do that? There are a lot of unanswered questions here.

Grade: C. It might have fared better, but the closing credits took everything down a notch (they involve dancing to "Everybody Dance Now"). I'm pretty sure I could've made it another mile had I not seen that...

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the review. You just saved me 2 hours of my life. No. Wait I wasn't going to see this movie anyway. Damn, I guess I lost 5 minutes reading the review. oh well. Love the review.

I'll be back in a year to see the Cardiocinema review of Get Smart. Steve Carell should quit doing this crap and stick to being funny.

Ronson said...

Glad you liked it!

Yeah, I don't know what's up with Carell lately (other than he's maybe thinking of the gobs and gobs of cash he's making). Still, I think he could do that with some funnier projects...

I'm almost certain "Get Smart" will hit the Cardio Cinema by early 2009...

Mark said...

I'm going to see Get Smart, but only for Anne Hathaway. I sort of have a crush on her.

Ronson said...

I can't decide if Get Smart is going to be good or not. Seeing Carell run through the old Don Adams routines is pretty painful, but there are other moments in the trailer that make it at least look a little fun.

Just a very, slightly, tiny bit? ...Maybe?

Ronson said...

Confirmed: I have since seen "Get Smart" and I can safely say that it's actually a decent movie. Although that may have had something to do with the fact that I saw it for free in a very comfortable seat...