Bruce Almighty

I have not watched any movie for a long time, be it on TV or in the cinema. It is certainly relaxing to laze at home catching Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty.

Jim Carey has met with the most unlucky days in his life. He blamed God for not helping him and turning a blind eye to his predicament. He was 'paged' by God. After talking to God, he was given all God's power while God went on a vacation. Jim suddenly was known as Bruce, the Almighty.

When bestowed with God's power, he had initially used it for his own selfish purpose to gain personally. He was reminded from God that he had to take over God's job in helping people while God was on vacation. Since Jim Carey had previously complained about God doing a bad job. it was a splendid chance to prove that he could do better.

Only then did he understand the enormity of the job. He was overwhelmed by the neverending prayers. To quickly fight fire, he simply said yes to all prayers. thinking that he would resolve all misery and problems plaguing the world. Never did he realise he was more wrong. By saying yes to all people who wanted to win lotteries, he ended up creating many winners and thus reducing the prize money per person. This resulted in social unrest and chaos broke loose.

Does the situation sound familiar? How often we may land ourself in a hypothetical situation where we think that if we are in our parents, our lovers, our friends or our bosses' shoes, we will be able to do things better? We think that if we are the CEO of the company, we will not do this and we will do that so that employees have better morale and company makes more money. Or we will think that if we are our parents, we will not be nagging our children or meddle with their affairs so often.

Yet, when we become bosses and parents, do you not see yourself doing some of the things that you do not want your bosses or parents ever to do as a subordinate or child? Despite our decisions as bosses or parents being unpopular, we are still making them because we see that sometimes a seemingly bad decision may not necessarily be a bad one and vice versa? We often make decisions given the best information we may have or with a long-term outlook that in the short term, the decision may seem fruitless or even callous?

Or worse, when we are given powers as bosses and parents, we too can be temporarily consume with the greed of power that we forget our altruistic aims. We may even start to abuse the powers for our personal gains. Afterall, power can be so attractive that it turns evil.

Beneath the jokes of Bruce Almighty, it is a self-reflecting story. It is always easy to imagine being able to do a better job than another person. It is not difficut to imagine but it is often difficult to carry out the idealisms in reality.