A "pleasurable" film with a lot of lost potential.

Rating: 8/10 (4 May 2015)

I'll admit, my experience with Jim Carrey movies isn't large, but of the ones I've seen, this is definitely my favourite of the bunch.
The film follows Bruce Nolan, a news reporter who's fed up with his life. He's stuck doing the boring stories, such as reporting on Buffalo's biggest cookie. What he really wants is the job as an anchor on the evening news. When the job opens up, and he doesn't get it, he vents his rage, which results in him losing his job, and getting beaten up by a gang of thugs.
Bruce blames God for his misfortune, so in response, God decides to teach him a lesson, by giving him all his powers, with his only two limitations being that he can't tell anyone about it, or affect free will.
What follows is about half an hour of Bruce indulging in his powers. Whether it's making his girlfriend orgasm from the sound of his voice, punishing the gang of thugs that beat him up, or messing with the man who stole his job to get him fired, if Bruce wants it, it happens.
The problem is what happens next. Bruce girlfriend Grace becomes disheartened with how much of a selfish dick he's become (Or rather, how much of a selfish dick he's always been, but now he can express it more), and leaves him. After that, the entire rest of the film becomes about Bruce moping around, and trying to get her back.
Now, I have no problem with having a little bit of romance in this movie. The problem is the mix. The movie spends just as much time, if not more, on Bruce's failing love life, as it does on the promised Godly antics. I watched his movie expecting a man to have fun being God, rather than it being about him losing his girlfriend and trying to win her back.
The thing is, it didn't have to be that way. Between the deleted scenes available on the DVD, and more scenes that are in the script (some of which were filmed, as revealed by production photos), there was plenty of content that could have been done to stretch out the "Bruce enjoys his powers" bit of the movie, so that the movie was closer to what was actually advertised.
Because that's my biggest gripe with the movie; it's unrealistic. Now, I can understand that, despite it being the most realistic situation, this movie can't be 90% sex, since age ratings and all, but I don't believe what we got was realistic even with that proviso. I've mentioned before that the entire last half hour of the movie is Bruce trying to win his girlfriend back. He can't just force her to take him back, due to his inability to edit free will, but did it never occur to him to just erase her memory of what he did? Or just re-wind time to stop it happening in the first place? Especially as Bruce himself said that God could just "clean everything up in 5 minutes if he wanted to".
It's these faults that ruin the movie for me, and prevent it from being perfect. Despite this, it's one of my favourite movies, and I do recommend it, if only so you, like me, can wish God would give you his powers too.