When Hollywood runs out of entertaining ideas, it turns its attention to the good old Bible. And why shouldn’t it? The Good Book is full of whimsical stories full of magic and always ending in a moral. To say Hollywood style film-making is just the same is probably going a bit far, yet it is unarguable that the American studios’ productions always have included an element of moral education, promoting traditional values. Evan Almighty is in this tradition, and its weaknesses are not so the result of secularisation, as the increasing isolationism of American politics.

Tom Shadyac’s follow-up to Bruce Almighty (2003) (starring Jim Carrey as a man who is given almighty powers by God himself to rule the world), is based on a story from Genesis, as the hero soon learns. Evan Baxter (Steve Carrell, The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)), a newly-elected US Congressman, has a loving wife and three healthy sons; he is prosperous and well liked. His election motto was to ‘Change the World’ and, in his naïve way, he hopes to achieve it. Every night, he sets his clock to 6.30am, but miraculously, it rings every morning at 6.14am. And every morning he is brought plumbing tools, and wood. His new work-car plate reads GEN 614. Animals of all kinds, from birds, mice, snakes and bovines, gather slowly around him in pairs. This rings a bell, so when he stumbles across The Bible, he opens to verse Genesis 6.14 and reads: ‘So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out’. God has chosen Evan to save the world from a new flood.

Given the current environmentalist agenda, the film does well to identify the contradiction between our actions towards nature and our consciousness of the potential threats nature poses to us. We all feel like Evan, that none of us should be given the blame for the global warming phenomenon, nor the burden for trying to tackle it. Shadyac follows the Noah’s Ark story closely, trying to look at it not from a global perspective, but rather Noah’s (in this case Evan’s) limited experience with the world around him. If God (a relaxed Morgan Freeman) tells you that his decision for a flood is final, than one can’t do much but accept the burden and ‘Change the World’.

The film abounds in successful comedy scenes driven by Evan’s getting to grips with his task, as well as hiding his venture from Congress, especially once his razor stops working and he grows an immense beard. Evan knows that if the truth came out it would provoke a media frenzy about this ‘deluded Christian fundamentalist who wants to save the world with his ark in Washington DC’. The character is therefore put at the core of an existential crisis, caught between his knowledge of God and his own destiny, and the world’s (and even most Christians’) dismissal of Earthly manifestations of the divine as cases of madness or attention-seeking – the same crisis explored exquisitely in Lucian Blaga’s play Zamolxis and recently in Mark Dornford-May’s Son of Man (2006).

Evan Almighty works for most of its run-time, until its disastrous dénouement involving a flood of Washington DC, which devastates the capital’s architecture, including the White House (but does not claim any lives). It is not the first and won’t be the last time the end of the world is identified in a Hollywood picture with the destruction of American symbols, but this is unconvincing. Shadyac sucks his audience so completely into the Biblical myth that he leaves himself little room for manouvre in terms of the plot, but the ark story makes little sense in a localised flood in an area where most animals aren’t found anyway. It eventually turns out that God wanted Evan to make an ARK, not that wooden zoo, but simply an Act of Random Kindness (but then why send the wood?!).

Evan Almighty will sell well, because it is fun, and has a good family feel to it. It is a shame though that a brilliant premise, dealing with issues of social identity, environmentalism, and political corruption within Congress – all within a comedy – was turned into a lame insult to our intelligence, and even to that of the animal kingdom.