Yes, 'Dogma' is most offensive: It's sinfully talky
Matt Damon, Ben Affleck as two angels gabbing their way back into heaven.

By Carrie Rickey
INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC

Cast out of heaven and banished to Wisconsin, fallen angels Loki and Bartleby have had a few thousand years to nurse their anger and doctor their way back in.

In Kevin Smith's Dogma, the winged ones (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) are wise to a cosmic loophole that will (1) restore them to the friendly skies and - oops! - (2) destroy the universe.

Dogma aspires to be irreverent - and often succeeds, in a shambling, mumbly Monty Python sort of way. But finally this loquacious comedy is irrelevant. The tonic of previous Smith films, such as Clerks and Chasing Amy, is in the ratio of precocious wisdom to adolescent profanity. While his script for Dogma is likewise invigorating, the time has come for Smith to learn his way around a movie camera and the editing room. This is, after all, his fourth feature.

However amusing it is to watch Damon and Affleck get their mouths, and minds, around the language, cinematically speaking, Dogma is a dog.

Each shot is almost invariably that of two characters talking. The handful of action sequences involve an angel or apostle crashing down from the sky like a dead pigeon.

Is Dogma blasphemous, as several religious groups charge? Only if it is blasphemy to be a skeptical believer, like Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), an abortion-clinic counselor who is visited by Metatron (Alan Rickman), a Seraph With Attitude, and told that she can stop the Apocalypse.

Who wouldn't be skeptical of such a prophecy made by a guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt, all the better to hide his wings?

Who wouldn't be dubious that the portals of a church in Red Bank, N.J., are the gateway to both the Pearly Gates and Armageddon?

Who wouldn't cast a cocked eye on those slackers, Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and the director himself reprising their characters from Smith's earlier efforts), who are supposedly prophets?

The experience of Dogma is like listening to cracks from the peanut gallery without anything to watch onstage. The movie is all talk, no action.

Two sets of buddies provide the running commentary. From one direction we hear Loki and Bartleby delivering disquisitions on theology and fallibility, while from the other there are Chatterbox Jay and Silent Bob offering what amounts to their metacriticism of Bethany's attempts to thwart the diabolical angels.

What intermittent fun the film offers is supplied by the rude humor of Chris Rock, who plays Rufus, the 13th Apostle, the one who claims to have been written out of the Bible for reasons of Theological Correctness.

I could have done without the obligatory scene in a strip club, where Bethany serendipitously meets Serendipity (Salma Hayek), a temperamental lap-dancing muse who doesn't have a whole lot to do with the plot except look fetching in a white-satin bustier. And a sequence in which Loki and Bartleby shoot up a corporate boardroom where Mooby the cow (a combo sacred cow, Golden Calf and Mickey Mouse figure) is a little creepy, considering that Dogma began life as a Miramax production and Miramax is a Disney subsidiary. Alanis Morissette's cameo as God made me smile.

Is Dogma sacrilegious? No more so than one of the Cecil B. De Mille biblicals that shows sin in the first seven reels and redemption in the eighth. There is a difference between sacrilege and irreverence.

It does commit a cardinal sin of filmmaking. It's boring.