SAINTS above! Does Steve Carell want to go straight to hell? This reimagining of the Bible's flood in modern-day America earns the once-funny comedian a oneway ticket. It's supposed to be a family comedy but it is swamped by a conservative Christian, subtle-asa-locust-plague message about divine purpose and the sanctity of the family.

Tom Shadyac previously directed Bruce Almighty, the 2003 Jim Carrey vehicle in which God (aka Morgan Freeman) hands over power to a TV reporter. This story is more Mr Smith Goes To Washingtonmeets Genesis.

Evan Baxter (Carell), a newly elected but naive senator, is asked by God (Freeman) to build an ark in his back yard. He is warned a flood is coming. Meanwhile, a burly senator played by John Goodman is pushing a bill through the senate that whiffs of corruption.

Evans's cardboard wife (Laura Graham) believes he is going nuts: each morning his hair is irreversibly longer and whiter.

Soon he is decked out in flowing robes. The animals then begin to arrive in pairs.

It would have been more fun if this film had been made by evolutionary biologists . . . that way the paired-off animals would have devoured each other, instead of sitting politely waiting for laughs which never come. Carell relies on poor slapstick and he looks increasingly uncomfortable, caught between funny and serious without ever managing both.

Without the goofball antics of Jim Carrey to distract, Evan Almighty is laid bare for what it is.

It hasn't an ounce of grace.

Paul Lynch The Hoax (Lasse Hallstrom): Richard Gere, Hope Davis, Alfred Molin, Marcia Gay Harden.
Running time: 115 minutes.
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THE Hoax tells the real-life story of a fake Howard Hughes biographer and how close his book came to being published.

It starts as a common-orgarden tale of literary failure. In 1971, Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) is a novelist whose book is said to be the next big thing.

Instead, his publishers go cold on it, and it gets dropped: "a thirdrate Philip Roth knock-off, " says his editor Andrea (Hope Davis).

After some agonising, he has his "eureka" moment: he will give them the life story of the single most fascinating man in America: the aviator, mogul, eccentric billionaire and "lunatic hermit" Howard Hughes. So what if he's never spoken to Hughes?

In its latter stages, the movie aims for a level of seriousness when a dodgy deal Hughes made in the '60s threatens to rebound on Richard Nixon (a more famous fraudster). Irving includes it in the fake autobiography, and soon White House aides are having conniptions about its threat to the Prez. In fact, it was Watergate a few months later that would do the job. This diversion down the corridors of power rather muddies the waters and turns The Hoax into something darker than it really is. All of a sudden Irving isn't just involved in a larky deceit, but a high-stakes Washington scandal.

Richard Gere simply doesn't convince as a man desperate or devious enough to kid a whole country. The film itself seems to have been working in disguise, starting out in the footloose spirit of Catch Me If You Can and then morphing into All the President's Men. Like Irving's book, it doesn't hold up.