How did this happen?

Morgan Freeman is a genuine Hollywood legend. It doesn’t matter what role he plays, he always exudes dignity. He inhabits the skin of his character, whether it’s a prisoner as in the Shawshank Redemption and The Power of One, some dude of law enforcement in Seven or Kiss the Girls, or even the President in Deep Impact. He’s been in Oscar winning films like Amistad and Million Dollar Baby. And even when he is in a ridiculous film like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, he manages to stand out as the one cast member who is actually doing any acting.*

Lauren Graham is not well known for her work in films, but has proved her acting talents beyond doubt on the small screen. With a little help from a great supporting cast and former Buffy script writer Jane Espenson, Ms Graham has brought us one of the most real, engaging, emotionally honest, flawed and utterly likeable characters in the history of television. It is a tribute that how well she has done this that most people would struggle to actually tell you who she plays, but few people have not, at some stage, heard of Lorelai Gilmore.

Steve Carrell has recently won endless amounts of critical acclaim for his performance in a show that most critics would have expected to absolutely hate, the US version of The Office. He is in just about everything that gets made at the moment, and even though I have no interest in ever seeing The 40 Year Old Virgin, there is no doubt that this man has considerable comic talent.

John Goodman’s career got off to a less than promising start, what with first achieving prominence as the husband on Roseanne and going on to star in The Flintsones and King Ralph, the latter being so bad that everyone single person the world mocked it, including John Goodman. Depsite these early missteps, he regularly hosted Saturday Night Live, he scored a recurring role on The West Wing, and he achieved endless amounts of indie cred for his exceptional performance as an embittered Vietnam vet in Born of the Fourth of July The Big Lebowski, which made up for all his past mistakes in the space of one very good film.


It is strange enough that even one of these people would agree to be in “Evan Almighty”. The fact that all four of them made this mistake is mindblowingly impossible to comprehend.


I hardly ever give up on a movie. I sat through Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi’s “The Boiler Room” to the bitter end.** I have actually seen all of “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer”. I could even tell you in some detail how “Highlander II: The Quickening” ends. Despite all of this, I gave up on Evan Almighty after 25 minutes and I’m thrilled with that decision.

The appearance of these four otherwise fine actors in Evan Almighty clearly amounts to the biggest collective misjudgment since Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Charles Grodin and Isabel Adjani sat around smoking in the manner of Daniel Johns and Peter Garrett*** and saying “Hey, this script looks fantastic, lets all agree to be in Ishtar.”

Hopefully, this giant collective mistake will shortly be scientifically proven to have been exceeded by that meeting where a bunch of senior Liberal Party figures sat around and said “Hey, let’s stick with Howard, we’re sure he’ll win it for us.”

Join me in hoping, folks. Join me now.






*Yes, we all loved Alan Rickman as the Sherriff, but that was precisely because Rickman clearly was not making any attempt at acting, he was just having fun.

** Arguably this was worth it just to witness Honey Bear’s awesome perfect fury as she screamed at the television “NO, it can’t be over, NOTHING HAPPENED YET”

*** ALLEGEDLY