Review by Sam McAbee

First off, I'd like to thank Kevin Smith for making this movie. It seems as though Mr. Smith realizes the sad truth of the coming millenium. He sees that we're all drifting far from our faith and straying away from the arms of God. He sees that we're all destined to spend eternity in a fiery hell, thanks to our hedonistic, atheistic wandering. So what has he done? He's taken it upon himself to make a film that's going to save us all from that Hell. He's made a two hour and ten minute film that gives us all a little taste of that eternal pit of fire. He's trying to wake us up and shake the Holy Ghost out of our heathen souls by purging our spirit of sins and worldly lust by making us ache with discomfort and sickening disgust. With Dogma, Kevin Smith has managed to turn us all into martyrs in a mere 130 minutes, if you can last that long. Being a martyr is hard work, and Dogma is living proof of that.

While watching Dogma, sitting in a crowded theater, filled with snickering Kevin Smith fans, I couldn't help but feel the vengeful hand of God smacking the back of my heathen head again and again, with each and every crowd consensus chuckle and over-used self-referential in-joke. The film worked as a tour through Hell, for me at least. I went to the film simply because of my overbearing, lecherous, lustful longing for Linda Fiorentino. I mean, I'm a guy that bought the unrated, directors cut of Jade with the hope of seeing a little of Linda's cookie. I even have copies of Vision Quest and Gotcha for Christ's sake! I've probably masturbated to this woman more times then I've had sex. So my entry into the Dogma Hell was properly initiated. Once lured into the pit by the persuasive Satan Smith, he unleashed a world of unknown horrors for my simple mind to absorb. He probed my soul with molten sticks of burning pain and unrelenting images of George Carlin. (Is there a fate worse than death? Ha, I'll say, and its name is George Carlin!) He blurred my thoughts and fooled me into actually looking forward to Matt Damon's presence on screen, left me cowering in urine-soaked fear, shivering through every awful '80's movie reference that dripped from the mouths of the 40 foot demons. Not even Linda's beautifully flawed face could save me from the depths I was sinking in. Every time I looked to her for salvation and forgiveness, another image of a frightful beast would lash out, burning my virgin flesh with adolescent, meandering pseudo-philosophical words that only added more bricks to my tomb of horror. I sat quiet and still, praying to God that those scientists in Long Island would just collide those fucking ions and kill us all, right then and there.

Dogma is supposed to be a satire. The problem is Kevin Smith doesn't know how to make satire: his technique is far too obvious, anxious and overblown to maintain the required subtlety for more than five minutes. He turns what should have been a challenging, entertaining and thought-provoking idea into a bloated, boring and mind-numbing act of self love that leaves the audience defeated and violated. His focus is about as on target as his acting ability (or Chris Rock's for that matter), and his script seems to have lost a lot in its evolution from idea to paper to film. The worst thing about Dogma is the car wreck tragedy of the whole project. It's a great idea, the idea that the exposure of God's flaw could lead to the end of everything, thanks to his own rejected and neglected creations (fallen angels). It's an idea that reeked of limitless potential for social and theological commentary and satire, something that would have been a welcomed breeze in the pollution of the corporate safeway filmmaking of today.And Smith got a good amount of talented people involved in the project, people that one would think would only add to the energy and focus of the film. Of course there are still a few douche bags I could have done without--did I mention George Carlin was in it? Dogma just fell flat on its fat, stupid ass. It unraveled by the end of the first reel and never bothered to clean up the mess. It kept tripping over the trash it had thrown all over the place, becoming more and more smug as reel after reel after reel of film poured onto the screen like a life sucking blob of unnecessary conceit. But if you like that sort of thing, then Dogma's for you!

Maybe part of the problem is that I'm not a fan of Kevin Smith, maybe I just missed the point, like I have with all of his work. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it. It must be because I find him to be the bronze memorial statue of all that is annoying in "youth" oriented film. His vision is not that of a slacker but of a sloucher. He seems to throw punches and run, repeatedly. He writes bad, thesaurus born, light English Lit. dialogue. I imagine Mr. Smith sitting, smirking behind a laptop in a bad coffee house with Depeche Mode and The Cure playing in the background, laughing loudly at his tapestry of pop culture-stained quirks and crude bathroom humor. There's nothing worse than dialogue that sounds like it came from a word processing program, and Kevin Smith's disease-infected cum wad of four films feel like they shot right out of the printer, fresh from his smart-ass mouth. His characters all seem to bloom from his wet dream desire to sound clever, to be witty, to be the John Hughes/Woody Allen of the pot and Twinkie generation. And it's a shame that an idea as good as Dogma could have been had to come from a man as limited and half-assed as Kevin Smith. Have fun in Hell.