Bruce Almighty: Critic Reviews

A perfectly respectable Jim Carrey comedy that makes you feel as if you're right back in 1997, watching Liar Liar.

Rambunctiously funny.

This has some very funny moments and lines in its first act, and then jettisons the comedy in favour of a self-important deadly serious feelgood ending.

Everyone is well cast and no one more perfectly than Freeman, who is far more God-like than George Burns ever was.

[Carrey] is so gifted a physical comedian that even mediocre material shines in his talented hands.

Something between an indiscretion and an atrocity, in the key of that most human yet loathsome of self-indulgences, vanity.

Basically, Bruce Almighty is about getting Carrey to stop acting up. But without his misbehaving, there's no movie.

Bruce takes over for the vacationing deity, but despite an initial surge of jolly, somewhat cruel chaos (as when he forces the new anchor to unreel paragraphs of gibberish on camera), things soon turn soggy.

When Carrey is doing his thing as the Almighty, histrionically whipping up one miracle after another and relishing the power, Bruce has you spring-cleaning your lungs with laughter.

It's Carrey who must carry this film, and he lifts Bruce Almighty to the heavens.

Exactly what it looks like: a cute premise extended to feature length, with plenty of opportunity for Mr. Carrey to mug for the camera.

Very snappy, sweetly moral.

A charmer, the kind of movie where Bruce learns that while he may not ever make a very good God, the experience may indeed make him a better television newsman.

It's stunning how a movie about someone who gets to be the ultimate high-and-mighty could set its sights so low.

Because there's always been a megalomaniac lurking inside Carrey's manic personality, it's funny to see him literally play God.

Powerfully entertaining.

Yep, this is the Carrey America loves -- off-the-wall, over-the-top, elastic, spastic and fantastic.

The movie works when Carrey's mugging it up ... but melts into a saccharine tub of goo when he plays it straight.

Mr. Carrey gets some of his biggest laughs in years by playing up the darker side of his character's small-mindedness.

There's remarkably little done with a premise snatched from high-concept heaven, adding yet another file to the growing cabinet of under-realized comedies.

The problem is that Bruce is an unlikable, self-centered character.

Often entertaining, but it could have been more.

Carrey seems engaged in a kind of war with his own best comic instincts.

The whole thing reeks of the formulaic, of a carefully packaged bid to propel the star back to his appointed place in the commercial constellation, all the while depriving him of the dark side that got him there in the first place.

The laughs in Bruce Almighty are thinly spread across a vast, bland cake of uplifting sentiment.