Bruce Almighty arrived in theaters on May 23, 2003, with Jim Carrey as a Buffalo television reporter who gets handed the keys to the universe and immediately uses them to fix his career. Tom Shadyac directed. Steve Koren, Mark O’Keefe and Steve Oedekerk wrote it. The tagline asked, “In Bruce we trust?” The answer, 23 years on, is: not really.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
Jim Carrey as Bruce Nolan
Carrey plays Bruce Nolan, a field reporter for Eyewitness News on WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York. Bruce wants the anchor desk. He does not have it. He has high ratings, a girlfriend named Grace Connelly, played by Jennifer Aniston, and a complaint about his life that he cannot stop airing.
Shadyac and Carrey had worked together twice before, on Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994 and Liar Liar in 1997. Bruce Almighty is the third. That history is the film’s whole engine: give Carrey a premise, point a camera at him, let him go.
The Worst Day, and the Warehouse
Bruce loses the anchor job to his rival, Evan Baxter, played by Steve Carell, while on assignment in Niagara Falls. He loses his temper on camera in a vulgar outburst and loses his job. Then he ridicules God.
God answers. Morgan Freeman plays Him in human form, and He meets Bruce in a warehouse. The deal: Bruce gets the divine powers for one week, as a test. Two rules hold.
- He cannot tell anyone he has the powers.
- He cannot use them against another person’s free will.
What Bruce Does With Omnipotence
He takes his old job back. He impresses Grace. He stages miracles and reports on them himself — finding Jimmy Hoffa’s body during a police training segment, dropping a meteorite harmlessly near a cook-off. The station calls him “Mr. Exclusive.” He makes the Buffalo Sabres win the Stanley Cup. He gets Evan fired by making him embarrass himself on air, then takes the anchor chair.
Then the prayers arrive. God explains the voices in Bruce’s head are petitions he now has to answer. Bruce builds an email system to handle them, the volume overwhelms it, and he sets the program to answer Yes to everything.
Two Powers, Two Rules
| Power | Limit |
|---|---|
| Divine abilities for one week | Cannot be disclosed to others |
| Control over events and outcomes | Cannot override another person’s free will |
The second row is the only rule the film takes seriously, and it takes it seriously for about four minutes. Bruce cannot make Grace stay. She leaves the promotion party after finding him being kissed by his co-anchor, Susan Ortega, played by Catherine Bell, who forced herself on him.
What the Comedy Costs
The premise is strong. The execution is a shrug. Bruce’s miracles are gags with no consequence attached, and the film keeps reaching for a lesson about humility it has not earned, because Bruce never really loses anything he cannot undo. Freeman is the best thing here — calm, amused, unhurried — and he is given almost nothing to do but explain the rules.
Aniston’s Grace exists to be failed by Bruce and then to forgive him. Carell’s Evan exists to be humiliated. Catherine Bell, Philip Baker Hall, Lisa Ann Walter and Nora Dunn fill out a cast that mostly stands around waiting for Carrey.
The Numbers Behind It
Universal released Bruce Almighty on May 23, 2003. It grossed $86.4 million in its opening weekend, a Memorial Day record at the time, and beat The Matrix Reloaded the following weekend, which surprised the industry’s pundits. It finished at $485 million worldwide, the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2003.
Reviews were mixed. A spin-off sequel, Evan Almighty, followed on June 22, 2007, with Shadyac directing, Oedekerk writing and Freeman returning.
Why It Still Does Not Hold
Bruce Almighty is a hit that has not aged into a good movie. The box office says audiences wanted the premise. The film says nobody involved quite knew what to do with it past the first act, and the Yes-to-everything prayer subplot — the one idea here with any teeth — gets resolved instead of explored.
The Carrey-Shadyac partnership produced two better films before this one. This is the third, and the weakest.
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