10 Movies That Might All Be In The Character's Head

4. Bruce Almighty

Jim Carrey runs around New York being silly, Morgan Freeman plays a cheeky deity and Steve Carell plays a nasty newsreader, who somehow, is actually a nice bloke come the sequel; it's fair to say Bruce Almighty is a film that isn't particularly thought-provoking. Unless, of course, it is. The film's going along fine, until Bruce has an argument with his girlfriend; he's driving along, minding his own business, when he bumps into a lamppost, and emerges from the car with a sore head. Suddenly he's contacted by God, who bestows all his power onto him. Skip forward all the cheating, the fame and the life lessons, Bruce is in another traffic accident, down the same stretch of road, this time hit by a truck. He wakes up, his girlfriend appears to want to forget everything that happened, and just go back to how they were. What if though, given that the prayer beads connect both accidents, Bruce imagined meeting God? The film would take a completely different message; it would be the story of a man who had a row with his girlfriend, hit his head in an accident and realised all by himself that his life wasn't as mediocre as he first thought. The only thing Grace would want to forget is their argument - something she's more likely to forgive than an infidelity - and even Carell's Evan Baxter is reasserted as the figure he was at the start of the film; the only thing that would need explaining is how Bruce got his job back. The homeless man at the end morphing into Freeman doesn't even need explaining. It's a metaphor for God being inside all of us, something that the film would definitely be endorsing if Bruce imagined the whole thing. Watch it again with this in mind. It's a much better film.