Goofball comedy high on imagination, despite a poor conclusion.

Rating: Null/10 (27 June 2003)

After hit-and-miss movies like `Man on the Moon' and `The Majestic', it's good to see rubber-faced Jim Carrey back to the genre he does best- screwball comedy. Particularly when the plot is as eye catching and promising as this- a man is given the power of God. This paves the way for plenty of hilarious antics and situations. Just too bad that the opening fifteen- twenty minutes are so slow to get going (bar the hilarious `Niagara Falls' sequence). But after the protagonist receives the power of God, the jokes kick in and the film continues to build more and more momentum as the hilarious scenes pile up.
There are certain scenes that will have you in stitches laughing, but it would be unfair to give them away. I just wish the trailers wouldn't give away so much of them. The subplots are really only a skeleton to keep the movie bound and in place, everything else comes from the gags. The visual effects and trick photography are surprisingly impressive as well. But when you take away all the gags and special effects, the movie is only a bit of gas. Then again, that's all we're really expecting out of it.

However, there is one simply unforgivable plot-hole that the film falls into. It packs all of the jokes into about into the middle fifty or so minutes and completely runs out of ideas in the third part. It becomes the sentimental `rom-com without the com' that it promised us it wouldn't be. This has happened before in high concept movies like `In & Out' when the blandness of the all-too-serious scenes sets in. That's a terrible shame because, had it had two or three more jokes, or maybe spaced them out a bit more, this would have been a better film.
Thankfully, Jim Carrey is on the top-form that we hoped he'd be in for his long expected return to comedy. No other actor could pull off this part with quite as much flexibility as Carrey does, and he does a great job. The same thing cannot Jennifer Aniston who doesn't prove to be anything the `Rachel Green' that we are very familiar with. Woefully unchallenged and nothing we haven't seen before, this could have easily been pulled off by any other lesser-known actress. Standard support from Philip Baker Hall (Magnolia, The Rock), Catherine Bell and Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy, Shawshank Redemption) as He Almighty.
It really is a shame that the film shamelessly plummeted into a downward spiral in the final third. But the middle part is undeniably funny; so all in all, this is a funny (if not groundbreaking) comedy movie. My IMDb rating: 6.0/10.