Bruce Almighty (PG-13)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 2003, and I'm sure I saw it sometime in the 2000s. I watched it again in 2025 to write a review. It was pretty much as I remembered it, which is to say it was reasonably funny. I would say it was guud, but not great. I also want to say that I considered putting my review under both "fantasy" and "comedy", but ultimately went with just the latter category.

Jim Carrey plays a local TV field reporter named Bruce Nolan, who is frustrated that he's constantly assigned puff pieces. He's hoping to get an anchor job when one of the news's anchors retires, but the job goes instead to his rival, Evan Baxter (Steve Carell). Bruce finds that out as he is about to do a live report, and it causes him to go on a rant that gets him fired. Everything goes badly that day, culminating in a fight with his girlfriend, Grace Connelly (Jennifer Aniston). Bruce blames God for all his problems, and then he gets a message on his pager, a phone number that eventually leads him to a building where he meets God (Morgan Freeman). God tells him that when Bruce leaves the building, he'll be imbued with all of God's powers. Bruce doesn't believe any of this at first, but soon discovers that it's true.

Bruce uses his powers selfishly at first... well, for a good while, actually. Eventually he starts hearing voices in his head, which God informs him are prayers he has to answer. It's more than he can handle, even after he sets his computer to receive prayers as e-mails. There are constantly millions of prayers that need answering, and that's just from one section of Buffalo, where he lives. So he sets an automatic "yes" response to all the e-mails, which naturally turns out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, he creates newsworthy events for himself to report on, in order to get his job back, and then messes with Evan's ability to speak, so that he'll lose the anchor job and it's given to Bruce, instead. His boss throws a party for him to celebrate. For awhile, his powers had made things better between him and Grace, but eventually their relationship runs into a problem, and Grace chooses not to attend the party with him. He calls her to try and convince her to come, and then his co-anchor, Susan Ortega (Catherine Bell) kisses him. Grace walks in on that, and breaks up with him. He tries everything to win her back, including trying to override her free will, but that's against the rules, so it fails. (It was a dick move, anyway. As was what he did to Evan.)

I've tried to avoid spoiling too many details, and I'm not going to say much about what happens from this point on. Except that Bruce eventually learns his lesson, gives up his selfish ways, and learns to be happy with his normal life. I gotta say, for most of the movie I had very mixed feelings about Bruce, as a person. I thought he could be a bit of a jerk in a lot of ways (sometimes more than a bit), but he wasn't a completely unlikable guy. But he was a better person, by the end of the movie. So I liked the ending. And I thought it was basically a good story, which ably demonstrated how hard it would actually be to have both God's powers and His responsibilities. Honestly, even when Bruce was trying to do good things, he ended up causing lots of problems, some of them quite serious. I will say that if I'd been in his position, I probably would have tried giving myself omniscience as well as omnipotence, to make it easier to deal with all the prayers, but I guess that never occurred to Bruce. And that's a good thing, because the movie would have less of a plot, and probably wouldn't have been able to deliver any lessons if things had been too easy for Bruce. But anyway, I like the positive message that we should all strive to be the miracles we want to see in the world. And maybe not blame God for all our problems. (Though I still feel like in real life, if there is a God, He could do a better job than He does. I probably couldn't, but He should be able to. At least I think I would have done a better job than Bruce did.) And... I dunno, the movie has its flaws, but mostly I liked it.

Followed by "Evan Almighty", which I've never seen, but kind of want to.