By Joe Baltake

'Dogma' sins on nearly every level

Rating: One star

Kevin Smith's new film, "Dogma" -- in which spirituality gets a hazing, frat house-style -- is definitely a media creation of the '90s.

It arrives with a distinctly contemporary movie pedigree -- support from industry honchos (Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein), film festival showings (Cannes and New York), controversy (a high-profile protest from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights) and the usual buzz.

And this film needs all the buzz and controversy it can muster because it also comes with '90s-style vapidity.

Based on what's on screen, it's difficult to discern exactly what all the fuss has been about. Smith's film is interminably silly but has a bad superiority complex some people might find impressive. It also has the kind of cluttered, near-indecipherable plot line other people might mistake for something profound. Nah, it's simply confused.

Supposedly his treatise on the nature of faith, Smith sets his absurdist fable in motion with the introduction of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (whose work together defines the word "chemistry") as Loki and Bartleby, two renegade angels bent on revenge and their own kind of salvation after having been tossed out of heaven by God herself.

That's right. God is a woman (personified in a cameo appearance by singer Alanis Morissette), and she's also mute. Because of this, God has her own spokesman, a public relations rep named Metatron (Alan Rickman) who speaks in the kind of high-toned, mellifluous British tones that anyone would want if he or she had the opportunity to pick a voice.

Metatron makes an emergency visit to Earth when news gets around heaven that Loki and Bartleby, who have been exiled to Wisconsin for all eternity, have plans to reverse their sentence. They've found a loophole in the church dogma that could finally get them back behind the pearly gates. There's this obscure little Catholic church in Red Bank, N.J. (headed by comic George Carlin, no less), and if they pass through its archway they won't be banished anymore.

Problem is, this act will also disprove God's infallibility, bringing an end not only to God herself but to the world as we know it. Loki and Bartleby have to be stopped, and Metatron settles on Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), an Illinois abortion-rights worker and, allegedly, a direct descendant of Jesus Christ, to do the job. It's an urgent assignment because Loki and Bartleby are indulging in a killing spree as they make their way to Red Bank.

"Dogma" is a road movie. It's three road movies, actually, as it goes back and forth tracing the steps of Loki and Bartleby and the trek of Bethany who, like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," picks up a ragtag collection of traveling companions. These include Chris Rock as the 13th apostle, Salma Hayek as a stripper-muse, and Jason Mewes and Smith himself as Jay and Silent Bob, who are thrown in only because these characters are in all of Smith's films. Jay tags along because Bethany works for an abortion clinic -- "A good place to meet loose women." The third subplot involves a fallen angel, the horned Azrael (Jason Lee), who wants in on all the action.

Yes, this film is as tiresome as it sounds, but its real offense is not its hip air toward religion but that it simply isn't funny. What is amusing is that the film is so long (a self-important 125 minutes) and that Smith has filmed it -- inexplicably -- in a wide-screen format. Maybe he wants a letterboxed edition of his movie when it hits video in three or four months. Whatever the reason, "Dogma" is the junkiest-looking wide-screen movie within memory.

The film was originally made by Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney, but was sold to Lions Gate, supposedly to protect Disney's image from the incendiary material. I'm sure Disney also wasn't happy with a sequence in the film involving the disreputable board of directors of a franchise called "Mooby the Cow," which is all-too-obviously a spoof of Mickey Mouse.