Heaven sent fun

At one point in Jim Carrey's new comedy, God asks him, "What's the point of being God?" "To feed the hungry and bring peace to mankind?" says Carrey. You groan - another redemptive sell-out in a film entirely devoted to using the borrowed powers of the Deity for self-advancement. But God has a come-back worthy of Jay Leno: "Sure ... if you want to be Miss America."

God is played by the sagest looking of Hollywood's senior black stars, Morgan Freeman. Carrey is, well, Jim Carrey, aka Bruce Nolan, small-time TV reporter for any comic event that happens in Buffalo, who has been cruelly denied promotion to anchorman on the news show. "Oh God, why do you hate me?" he rants to high heaven.

In fact, God works in a warehouse across the road, doubling his higher duties with those of janitor and odd-job man - the two roles historically assigned American blacks before " emancipation" (and pretty well after it, too).

Out of His overalls, God is clad in wellcut celestial white - a nicely subversive switch on the "coconut black", the guy who is black outside, but "whitey" by temperament inside. This film is more fine-tuned than you think, but goes by at such a clip that any offensiveness, racial or theological, is pretty well left blowing in the wind.

God is pretty pissed off by all demands made on His time and services. During a little walk together on the water, He hands over to Bruce for the week.

All great comics yearn to play God or Hamlet. We've been spared Carrey's Shakespeare; but the Good Book makes a perfect text. He is in tremendous form. No screen comic is faster on the quip, mug, double-take or mid-look gearchange than he. His "serious" films deny us those pleasures - though it was remarkable what he did by merely wriggling his ass in The Truman Show (he does a backside homage to it here, too).

The instant miracle he goes in for, suits his sleight-of-hand style better than any parts that require straight acting, as in Man on the Moon and The Majestic.

Carrey's director here is Tom Shadyac, who made one of his earliest, wackiest hits, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. You can see traces of that film, too - though, I regret to say, they are embedded in Bruce's love for an un-house-trained mongrel he has to carry outside, at full speed and in full flood (the dog, that is), no fewer than three times.

But if the gross-out market has to be catered to, Bruce Almighty produces a compensating amount of slicker gags for higher brows. Tentatively trying out God's powers in the diner, Bruce parts the tomato soup in his plate in a perfect little tribute to DeMille's famous parting of the Red Sea. He wipes the night sky clear of clouds and hauls the moon lightyears nearer him for making love. (It causes a tidal wave in the Far East).

He engineers miraculous scoops for his own outdoor TV broadcasts - unearthing Jimmy Hoffa's grave, being on the spot (well, near it) when a meteor lands - that knocks his desk-bound rivals literally out of the picture.