Bruce (Jim Carrey) is a Buffalo TV news reporter prone to cursing God for his bad luck. God (Morgan Freeman), a janitor who hangs around an empty office building saying things like A teenager who says no to drugs and yes to education: that’s a miracle, temporarily delegates his responsibilities to Carrey, with predictably chaotic results. The most talented of Jerry Lewis’s recent epigones, Carrey knows plenty about physical shtick, and the movie works best when it sticks closest to its skeletal sketch-comedy premise. But without a decent script, he can’t create much of a character, and the farce loses its edge the moment it starts trying to tell a coherent story. Director Tom Shadyac (Patch Adams) can’t fill in the blanks, but some of the secondary cast (Jennifer Aniston, Philip Baker Hall, Catherine Bell) offer decent company. PG-13, 101 min. (JR)