冒牌天神 1英语影评How big was the cookie?

Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a fairly successful reporter,very much in love with his girlfriend Grace (Jennifer Aniston).Despite this fairly comfortable life,Bruce is dissatisfied and longs to become an anchorman on his local TV station.
After a particularly bad day,in which he loses his job and is beaten up when offering help to someone,Bruce challenges God to do something.Appearing in human form God (Morgan Freeman) responds and gives Bruce his power for a week,challenging him to see if he can make a better job of things.
As Bruce,Carrey draws on his whole range of physical comedy (that you either love or hate!) as he makes selfish and flippant use of his newly acquired powers.Two examples are the toilet training of his incontinent dog,and the overnight enlargement of Grace’s bust.Bruce then begins to be tormented by the prayers of millions,for which he invents a computer programme that simply replies with a ‘yes’ to every request.
Eventually the novelty of being God wears off for Bruce as he realises the consequences of his self-centred use of the power entrusted to him.In particular he learns the lesson that love cannot be forced on anyone as Grace walks out on him.
If you like Jim Carrey’s manic style,you will enjoy Bruce Almighty.Some Christians may find the film offensive and there are certainly some irreverent moments.However,there are also deeper themes running through the film,not least the question of free will,and there is certainly enough to get your non-Christian friends into a conversation about life,the universe and everything.
Bruce Almighty raises some common questions about God.For example,if God is a God of love as well as being all-knowing and all powerful then why do bad things happen?How on earth can God allow young children to be snatched off the street and killed by perverts?Why do disasters happen?How is it that so often it seems that good people suffer while evil people live lives of luxury?There are no easy answers to such questions,thought it might just be that we are asking the wrong questions based on a distorted picture of God.
In the film,Bruce is given God’s powers to use as he pleases providing that human free will is not interfered with.Very quickly Bruce discovers that things are not as easy to fix as he imagined.Having indulged himself in the selfish use of power,Bruce begins to realise that the world is a more complicated place than he imagined.He tries to stop the deluge of prayers that come his way only to discover that his simplistic solution of saying ‘yes’ to everyone does not make the world a better place.In fact Bruce’s own community ends up tearing itself apart as different people’s answered prayers conflict with each other.He is also faced with the prospect of losing the love of his life and being powerless to do anything about it.
Bruce Almighty challenges the popular perception of God as an almighty being who oversees the universe,yet who mystifies us by not intervening to stop bad things happening in people’s lives.It is hardly surprising that many people have already rejected the notion of such a perverse deity.The sad thing is that such an image of God is remote from the reality.God is not some sort of divine puppet-master.Instead God loves us unconditionally and calls us into relationship.We see this most clearly in and through the person of Jesus Christ through whom God entered into our humanity.God longs for us to respond in love,yet never forces us to do so.Each of us is free to accept or reject God’s love.
That point is picked up admirably in an exchange between Bruce and God where Bruce asks how he can make Grace love him without interfering with her free will.God replies that it is something he has never managed to solve!
Perhaps instead of seeking answers to unfathomable questions,the focus of our energy should be on a growing relationship with the God who has met us in the person of Jesus.The God who does not sit remote from the struggles of what it means to be human,but who shares the journey with us every step of the way.It is through such an encounter with God that we can begin to makes sense of an often confusing and sometimes frightening world.