Bruce Almighty

The scene everyone remembers was not in the first draft. In Mark O’Keefe’s version the character Steve Carell plays managed a car dealership; it was Steve Oedekerk’s rewrite that turned Bruce into a Buffalo news reporter and made the teleprompter sequence possible at all. O’Keefe believes Carell improvised part of the gibberish. The strongest comic moment therefore belongs to the supporting player, not the star. The second observation is structural. A premise of unlimited power is spent for most of the running time on personal scale gags: the dog, the girlfriend, the rival, the promotion. The idea is genuinely tested only where Bruce grants every incoming prayer at once, and that stretch sits near the end, kept short. The Buffalo of the film is not Buffalo either; the streets are a backlot at Universal in California. The number given out for reaching God was a working line rather than the fictional 555 prefix, and a church and a shop that shared it took hundreds of calls. For: anyone who misses what Jim Carrey can do with a face and a body. Not for: Jennifer Aniston’s character exists almost entirely to be wronged and then reconciled with, so viewers tired of romantic comedies where the woman only reacts will notice. Anyone hoping the religious question gets argued should look elsewhere.