Movies - Bruce Almighty

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Bruce Almighty

	Movies - Bruce Almighty

Bruce Almighty (2003) is a comedy movie directed by Tom Shadyac and written by Steve Koren, Mark O'Keefe and Steve Oedekerk. It stars Jim Carrey, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Aniston.

Steve Carell, Catherine Bell, and Philip Baker Hall co-star. Tony Bennett and "Juan Valdez" make cameo appearances.

The tagline of the movie is In Bruce We Trust? Another, lesser seen tagline was The guy next door just became The Man upstairs.

Plot

Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a TV news reporter who fails to get a job as an anchorman and, after a series of other bad luck incidents, complains to God that He is treating him unfairly and is doing a poor job as supreme deity. Bruce is then contacted by God (Morgan Freeman) and endowed with almighty powers to prove that he can do a better job. Bruce quickly abuses his new-found powers for personal gain, only to be reminded that he also has to take care of other people's problems. Meanwhile, Bruce endangers his relationship with girlfriend Grace Connelly (Jennifer Aniston) through his self-centered behavior. In the end, Bruce realizes that God's powers are best left for God to handle and graciously asks for God to take control of his life.

The movie surprisingly features God as a wise, but smart-alec middle-aged man. God quotes a line from one of Carrey's other movies ("Alrighty then", from Ace Ventura), and tells Bruce that if he wants, Bruce can fix all the world in a few minutes, knowing full well from millennia of experience that he cannot. God is also cast in a sort of sympathetic light. Bruce receives tens of thousands of prayers, all from, according to God, his single town. Having to listen to the prayers of the whole world, one can only imagine how God feels. This also serves to explain why God frequently does not answer prayers: Bruce types at super-sonic speed to answer prayers, only to end up with more than he starts with, and he realizes with horror that merely answering prayers will take up his whole life. As Bruce and God themselves put it in two scenes:

Bruce: How do you make so many people love you without affecting free will?

God: Welcome to my world.

And a second scene over prayers

God: You made a mess of things, huh?

Bruce: I just gave them what they wanted.

God: Yeah, but since when does anyone know what they want?

Controversy and reaction

The film carefully avoids religious controversy as God seems to be of no particular denomination and few theological questions are discussed, with exception of Jesus (walking on water), Moses (Bruce parting his tomato soup), one quote from the Bible ("thou shalt not tempt the Lord."), and a gag about the Tetragrammaton (Bruce's e-mail service is "Yaweh!"). Issues such as omnipotence and omniscience are not explored in any detail as most of the film is set in the area of Buffalo, New York, as God only gives him management of part of Buffalo. The only hint at this is that the building Bruce meets God in is called "Omnipresence". The film does, however, take a clear stance on the issue of predestination, as the only restriction for Bruce, and presumably God, is that he cannot affect peoples' free will.
The movie was banned in Egypt due to pressure from Islamic religious circuits who objected to the portrayal of God in the form of a human being.
There were also rigorous protests from a small, but vocal, faction of the otherwise liberal Muslim population in Malaysia. The government did not outlaw its screening, and Bruce Almighty still appears occasionally, albeit heavily edited, on Malaysian satellite television.
Some contend that Robert Bausch, author of the book Almighty Me, is the original creator of the Bruce Almighty storyline, citing similarities between the book and movie. Bausch had no credit toward officially creating the story.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bruce Almighty ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Bruce Almighty; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay