“Sheep!”
Steve Carell takes some time off from the Office to build an ark that God has commissioned. Well, not really but this film has the almighty approaching a freshman congressman to do just that.
New York newscaster Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) has just been elected to Congress. He’s moving to a suburban neighborhood close to Washington D.C. with his wife Joan (Lauren Graham) and sons Dylan (Johnny Simmons), Jordan (Graham Phillips), and Ryan (Jimmy Bennett).
When he arrives in the capital he finds that he’s been given a swanky new office by Congressman Long (John Goodman). Long wants Baxter’s support on a bill that he’s been trying to get passed and thinks buttering up the freshman congressman will get his support.
Soon Evan stars to notice references to Genesis 6:14, “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood.” Pretty soon God (Morgan Freeman) has appeared to him and demanded that he do just that. Soon two by two of animals are following him around, he grows a beard that won’t go away, and his Congressional staff, Marty (John Michael Higgins) and Rita (Wanda Sykes), as well as his family thinks that he’s gone bonkers. However, God has other plans in store.
Evan Almighty goes down in the good book as one of the most expensive comedies ever made, clocking in with a budget of anywhere from 175 to 200 million dollars. The almighty seemed to not be with the film since it made roughly half of that at the U.S. box office. However, that doesn’t exactly make it a bad film and I thought it was rather good - although most of my laughs came from the irrepressible Wanda Sykes who had me guffawing with her quick comebacks on screen.
When you watch the special features you see that a lot of that money went into what you saw on the screen since they built a large portion of the ark and did use many trained animals. The film also has numbers visual effects shots and that also must’ve cost a pretty penny.
I thought the film was funny, had a good message and heart, but maybe they could’ve found a way to not try for all the big scenes that end up on the screen. I haven’t watched the first “Almighty” and that really shouldn’t affect you if you haven’t either since I really didn’t detect anything that seemed to connect back to it.
Steve Carell is funny, but has a dry humor that really doesn’t result in the belly laughs that I got from Sykes. I’m not saying that he’s bad and he does have some moments of heart in the film. I thought it was a good film, but it really didn’t live up to box office expectations (but not many films seemed to do that this last box office season) and I wouldn’t expect Fred Almighty anytime soon.
Evan Almighty is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. A fullscreen version is available separately. Special features include 14 minutes of deleted scenes introduced by Carell and 2 minutes of outtakes. The 6 minute “Ark-itects of Noah’s Ark” interviews director Tom Shadyac, Carell, John Michael Higgins, Morgan Freeman, production executive Linda Descenna, producer Michael Bostick, writer Steve Oedekerk, Wanda Sykes, construction coordinator Dennis Dewaay, foreman Michael Crowe, and special effects coordinator Daniel Sudick about the making of the film.
The 6 minute “Becoming Noah” adds interviews with special effects makeup artist David Anderson, Lauren Graham, and is about how they made Carell into the biblical character. The 3-minute “Steve Carell Unscripted” is Carell funning on the set. The 12 minute “Animals on Set Two by Two” is about how they wrangled all the real animals they used on the production.
The “Animal Roundup Game” is introduced by Jimmy Bennett and is a game where you have to help get the animals on the ark before the flood comes. The 5-minute “Almighty Green Set” is about the measures the cast and crew went to recycle (the sets were dismantled and given to Habitat for Humanity) and conserve (everyone rode bikes) during the production.
The 4-minute “It’s Easy Being Green” has the cast members reading us tips on how to conserve. The 2-minute “Random Acts of Kindness” has cast also encouraging us to ARK (Acts of Random Kindness). The 7 minutes “A Flood of Visual Effects” interviews the effects crew about how they accomplished the effects of the big finale. The 3 minute “Casting Call: Serengeti” is a comedy bit about sending somebody to the wild to make screen tests. The 6 minutes “Almighty Forest” is a list of names of people who visited a website and paid to have a tree planted in conjunction with the production.
I liked Evan Almighty and thought it was a very good film. I didn’t think it got very preachy until all of those bits in the special features about being green. Wanda Sykes provided a flood of laughs for me, but I thought that the rest of the cast was good as well.
Evan Almighty is now available at Amazon . It is available for pre-order at AmazonUK for a Nov. 26th release. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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