'Mighty' Movie Reviews: "Evan Almighty" And "A Mighty Heart"

SubBasket and I saw two movies this weekend -- "A Mighty Heart" on Friday night with our daughter, and "Evan Almighty" on Saturday afternoon with our boys. While they're clearly intended for different audiences, I felt I didn't waste my money seeing either one of them.

"A Mighty Heart" tells the story of the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and murder through the eye of his wife. While people are talking up Angelina Jolie for an Oscar, I thought that she should only deserve it if she was supposed to be playing an emotionless character for 99% of the movie. What I liked about the film is that I think it did a good job of portraying Karachi, Pakistan, the way I always thought the city would look like. In other words, you won't see a lot of people who see the movie saying, "Hey, let's vacation on the Pakistani coast this year." It's hard for a movie to keep the suspense up when you know how it's going to end, and this one didn't really do a very good job of it. But, because of the intensity and assumed accuracy of the "travelogue from hell" aspect of the film, I give it three kidnapping-suspects-hanging-from-the-ceiling out of five.

There's been a bit of controversy regarding "Evan Almighty" from the Hollywood chattering classes. The incomparable ninme provides a link to a review by a Hollywood blogger who claims the movie has a "Christian message" -- even though Jesus isn't mentioned once in the film! I didn't really like "Bruce Almighty" (I'm not a big Jim Carrey fan, except for his In Living Color stuff), so I was prepared to not like this film (even though I really do like Steve Carell). In the end, I was pleasantly surprised -- it was a whole lot funnier than Shrek 3 (which I recognize isn't saying very much). As long as you go in with moderate expectations, and enjoy funnyanimals who poop all over people and hit them in the crotch, you'll like this movie OK. I give it three spitting llamas out of five.